Best known for the line,"A thing of beauty is a joy forever."John Keats pursues this line of reasoning once more in Ode on a Grecian Urn.In this poem,an unknown narrator comes upon an ancient urn which captures his imagination and "overtakes" his mind .To the speaker,only the illustrations are relevant and fascinating. In the first stanza the man stands and addresses the urn as if it was capable of filling in the history of the depicted scenes.

In one stanza after another the speaker muses over the painted scenes around the pot.First a wild picture of pursuit is described as a group of men chasing a group of women. Secondly we are told of a pair of young lovers lying beneath the trees. The boy is playing a flute and the narrator seems to hear the music in his mind. In the third stanza the speaker expresses his feelings about the timeless nature of the boy and his music.In stanza number four,a pastoral scene is described as a band of villagers taking a cow to be sacrificed on an altar.

Finally in stanza number five,the narrator again addresses the enigmatic urn. Here he seems to get a response if only in his mind. The urn has a lesson for mortal man,"Beauty is truth,truth beauty". Once again this "Thing of beauty is a joy forever",unlike man who exists for but a brief moment and is gone like a burning candle in the wind.

The urn, passed down through time , does not age or die.Likewise the humans on the urn are frozen in their activities and can never reach the culmination of their various endeavors. The men can never catch the women,the lovers will never kiss and the villagers will never make their sacrifice. Man ,in contrast,ages and dies but he subsequently has the opportunity to fulfill his hopes and dreams. Here is seen the age old "Raging against the night".Man's
desire to live forever and create something of himself to survive and yet in some strange way envying his creation.In the last stanza Keats says:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Is this the speaker talking to the urn,or is the urn speaking to mankind? This has always been an ongoing debate. It is up to the reader to decide.

As far as form is concerned,each of the five stanzas is ten lines long and is written in iambic pentameter. It is divided into a two part rhyme scheme. The first four lines of each stanza tell us what it is about and the last six explain or develope the information.Many consider this poem imperfect and weak by comparison to other grander odes of the era.However it is still like a draught of fine spirits for the poetry lover. It is filled with beautiful imagery and flows splendidly off the reader's tongue. The truth is,it's beautiful.

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