The poet in an askance note begins to question what they are and what their reality is. The poet continues to ask –
What men gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
On the basis of these questions, the poet begins to explain the significance of those things engraved on the urn and gives a sharp contrast between these things and the reality of life.
Once again, in the short span of our life, we have sorrows and leaden-eyed despair. Here men sit and hear each other groan. In the dreary intercourse if daily life man gets nothing but the weariness, the fever and fret. This fever of this world hangs upon the beating of man’s heart.
But the world of art is above this fever and fret of this world. Here beauty is permanence and she always keeps her luster. Everything is fair in the world of art. The fact behind this is that art absorbs Time as if art grows with the time: -
“Thou foster-child of silence and slow-time”.
The bold lover would always remain young and the lady-love would ever be charming and fair. Because they have not consumpted love. The fulfillment of love is sign of decay. So, the poet says:-
“She can not fade, though than thou hast not thy bliss
For ever wilt thou love, she be fair. ”
Again, the fever of the world has no hand to touch the artistic beauty of the urn. The world of art is far above “all breathing human passion” and there is no “burning fore head” and “parching tongue” in the world of art.: -
“All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloyed.
A burning fore head and a parching tongue”
Hence, everything in the world of art is ever new, ever warm. There is no change in the world of art.
The poet while explaining the function of art and its relation to life, introduces the supreme function of art, - its power of evoking imagination. To an artist, a work of art evokes – imagination, and it haunts him with an unquenchable thirst to give birth a fragment of immense idea ,of what, human brain can conceive into reality.
“Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard
Are sweeter.”
The music of the piper engraved on the urn, widens the scope of our imagination. In fact, it throws us into an incessant channel of creativity. Thus, when imagination
cast on an art , finds a concrete shape, the beauty gets translated into reality .And such reality derived from art is eternal source of affection. The Urn herself unlocks this mystery to the poet ,-the artist : “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty”
The worth of art to an artist is that, art evokes imagination. And imagination transcends the artist to the world of beauty. And again when the artist becomes one with beauty, he realizes what truth is:
“As imagination seizes, beauty must be truth.”
Therefore we may conclude that art is an exhibition of idea through an image which evokes imagination and it rests on the concept of eternity. It remains unaffected by the claws of Time, where life is affected and gets deprecated. Thus, Keats very impeccably shows the mortality of life and the immortality of art in his Ode
On a Grecian Urn.
Subrata Ray .Uluberia .Mousumipara .West Bengal .India .
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