John Keats-Ode On A Grecian Urn - Poetry Supplement!
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John Keats-Ode On A Grecian Urn - Poetry Supplement!
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Hi, I\\u2019m Christy Shiver.
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And I\\u2019m Garry Shriver and this is the How to Love lit Podcast.\\xa0 This week- by way of Segway between\\xa0 Sophocles and the Greek theater \\xa0- to our next book the great romantic//gothic novel by Mary Shelley, Frankenstein\\xa0\\xa0 - \\xa0we have chosen the feature a Romantic take on the Greeks- Ode ON a Grecian Urn by John Keats- not to be misquoted by what seems more natural Ode TO a Grecian Urn.\\xa0
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That\\u2019s true- and very perceptive- there are far more Odes TO things than there are Odes ON things (although Keates does have more than one)-\\xa0 and obviously you would expect the Ode to be TO something or to someone because as we talked about in our discussion of the most prolific ode writer I know of, Paulo Nerudo, an ode is a poem TO something.\\xa0 But what you\\u2019e going to see in pehaps the most beloved ode in the English language- is that Keats, by design, has made this poem so cryptic and enchanting that no one really says with any true authority much about who this poem is to, what it is about, and even what it actually means- we\\u2019re all just so confused!!!. And really- at the end of our discussion and when we talk about what he feels is his contribution to the world with what he called \\u201cnegative capabilitity) even that should make total sense.\\xa0 \\xa0What people agree on is that it\\u2019s beautiful.\\xa0 This poem is truly truly beloved.\\xa0 And I\\u2019m not just saying tht to be vague= that is the flat truth of it.\\xa0
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Are you saying that everyone loves this poem BECAUSE they dohn\\u2019t know what it means or in spite of it?
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You\\u2019re getting ahead of where I want us to be in this discussion with that question= but the short answer is \\u2026Yes\\u2026and Yes\\u2026and this poem tells us it doesn\\u2019t even matter- let it be what it is.\\xa0 And that feeling sbout the world can actually make us feel good about ourselves\\u2026you\\u2019ll see\\u2026But first, let\\u2019s go over a little bit about what Romantic writers are really about, especially the Brits who really own this genre, in my mind.\\xa0 Everyrone loves them, and, of course, we\\u2019e not talking about Meg Ryan or Audrey Hepburn, although obviously we love them too.\\xa0 Romantic writers are those who come out a specific time and way of thinking starting with the last couple years of the 18th century and taking us into the early 1800s.\\xa0 Keats was born in 1795 and dies in 1821, so so sad and short a life.\\xa0 And he embodies a lot of what Romanticism was really about.
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Well, Historically, the world is really changing at this time period.\\xa0 Obviously the French Revolution and the French principles of liberty, equality and fraternity are extremely influential in what goes on on the continent of Europe, but not just thee.. those ideas impacted the Western world- all the way into all of the Americas. Not just North America- but- just focusing on England- we can see patterns that will eventually extend world wide- first of all the English extended voting rights to middle class males AND abolished slavery by 1832 (fortunately without a war)- these are two big social and political changes that represent obviously big results of a change in thinking.\\xa0 People like jean Jaques Rosseau led people to think about themselves and each other differently with ideas that seem obvious like, \\u2018Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains\\u201d. People began to allow to really think more emotionally- instead of the STEM- minded thinking of the enlightment, if you want to think about it that way.\\xa0 Thoughts like allowing love and quality of life to matter for everyone led to considerations and new thoughts like- people should be able to work in safety- and this resulted in the first law governing factory safety, if you can believe it.
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Well, I can absolutely believe it because the Romantic poets embody every bit of that and more, and we English people like to think that the poets, dreamers and writers and the ones on the front end of the ways people look and think about the world.\\xa0 And maybe that\\u2019s why we love Romantic writers- they \\xa0wanted to write about the common man and many of them WERE common men- not necessarily fancy lords sitting in castles writing, but\\xa0 common experiences- here\\u2019s a funny- John Keats was given what today we\\u2019d call an ethnic slur- he was referred to as being from the Cockney school, meaning that his language was low brow- the term was offensive- anyway Romantics talked about \\xa0how he/she felt, the natural world, the inner world, and a general questioning of the authority and tradition of their day.\\xa0 You could think of them sort of like the hippies of their generation of their day- challenging social norms and yes- and we\\u2019ll definitely see this with Mary Shelley- experimenting with the ideas of free love, drugs and sometimes resulting in extremely dangerous lifestyle choices- and dying young.\\xa0
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You say hippie- I say rock star culture- but interesting there is this cyclical nature of humanity- and the tensions between chaos and order that are the essence of being alive on planet earth and they are reflected in the arts.
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Yes, I think that kind of dichotomy is a wonderful way to look at Romantic poets actually- and specifically John Keats.\\xa0 Poor Keats was hyper sensitive to the tensions of life and felt them and expessed them so beautifully.\\xa0 Keats life was so so tragic. First of all, and this isn\\u2019t really tragic, but his dad was not some aristocratic earl, but the guy who takes care of the horses at an inn- a true working man.\\xa0 Sadly though, he died in an accident when Keats was nine.\\xa0 His mom remarried to a guy that doesn\\u2019t appear to be super-awesome, \\xa0but she dies of tuberculosis when Keats was 14- so now he\\u2019s an orphans together with four other sibilings.\\xa0 Four years after that, his grandmother who was raising them died-and that same year his baby sister died and two years after that, his brother died of tuberculosis.\\xa0 In all of this, because of financial problems, it was decided that he should be taken out of real and apprenticed to become a doctor- I\\u2019m not sure that job was prestigious back then like it is today.\\xa0
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No, it wasn\\u2019t, it was also a dangerous job if you consider what we know today about germs.\\xa0 And it clearly wasn\\u2019t his calling from what we know of his weak health.\\xa0 He got into writing and got published really early and decided to go for the big break out writing career \\xa0before he even got his medical license.\\xa0 He clearly didn\\u2019t like life in the city- he found it lonely a \\u2018jumbled heap of murky buildings\\u201d- to use his words.\\xa0 And the only other medical practicing I could find that he did was the nursing of his brother, the one you mentioned dying of tuberculosis.
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Really and truly, and this is my humble opinion, although I almost dare not have an opinion on somebody so beloved and well-studied as Keats.\\xa0 There are so so many Keats scholars out there who know eveyrhting there is to know about this young man, but it is my impression that it is exactly the fact that John Keats walked the shadowy line between life and death so long and with so much love that his perspective on life is so appealing.\\xa0 He stared at death so often, and it broke his heart and left him with so many real questions, yet his writing is not dark and hopeless like Edgar Allan Poe.\\xa0 He isn\\u2019t desparing like the nihilists that were to come after him.\\xa0 He clearly understands his mortatlity and loss and writes about it like the famous sonnet, \\u201cWhen I have fears that I may cease to Be\\u201d but there is such a sweetness to his work, maybe a certain innocence in the sense that he never got to finish living and wanted to live every moment, but not a naivite that he didn\\u2019t know about problems or troubles.\\xa0
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And cut short it truly was.\\xa0 He got sick on a hiking trip in Scotland in the summer of 1818 and really never seemed to recover although he did still continue to take care of his brother all the way until he died.
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He fell in love with Fanny Brawne, too but they couldn\\u2019t get married because he was too sickly and had no money.\\xa0 By the age of 24 I think even he knew he was done.\\xa0 He moved to Rome because he was told that the warmer climate might save his life, but on Feb 23, 1821, he was dead- and he never even knew he was going to be famous.\\xa0 They say he asked that his tombstone have the phrase, \\u201cHere lies one whose name was writ in water\\u201d instead of his actual name.\\xa0 Even though they ignred that- thnk goodness.\\xa0
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His name is actually on his grave in the Protestant graveyard in Rome.\\xa0 And of course there is the Keats- Shelley memorial house right next to the Spanish steps in Rome- a nice tribute really-
So, tell us, Christy.\\xa0 Why are we reading \\u201cOde ON a Grecian Urn\\u201d.
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Well, I would say because it\\u2019s a favorite, because it is- but that\\u2019s clich\\xe9.\\xa0 This poem is everyone in the world\\u2019s favorite.\\xa0 I would be much cooler if I liked a more esoteric one.\\xa0 There are literally thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of commentary on this poem.\\xa0 There are literatue professors who teach this poem every semester of careers that span decades- and I have read comments from these same professors claiming that they don\\u2019t tire of reading it.\\xa0 If you google litery criticism or go to a real online library, you\\u2019ll find out that every school of literary criticism claims this poem as a great example of whatever that school is trying to do- and I mean the most common ones like \\u201cfeminism\\u201d \\u201cnew criticism\\u201d \\u201cdeconstructionism\\u201d \\u201cNew historicism\\u201d \\u201creader-response criticism\\u201d and on and on we go.\\xa0 And I\\u2019ll tell you this- every single person reads this poem differently and absolutely understands it and their understanding is totally different.\\xa0 So, I have to offer this obvious disclaimer- We\\u2019re going to read it and think about it out-loud as best we can- and what I hope will happen to you as you listen to this poem through your ear buds or car radio speakers is that you\\u2019ll be able to look at the beaytiful and romantic world that keats is going to create for us, think about what we say about it, but know- that if you were next to us in this room- your ideas would definitely be different because - the genius of how this man writes is that he is able to get in your head with the perfect balance of obtrusiveness but also invisibility that just lingers around for a long time.
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Okay- Have I built it up enough.
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I\\u2019d say, it\\u2019s definitely made it sound confusing-But not to confuse anyone on what the poem is about- can we at least agree that it\\u2019s about a Greek jar.\\xa0
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No we cannot- we cannot even agree on that.\\xa0 And this is a tangent that is a little cool.\\xa0 So, during Keat\\u2019s life time, the Elgin Marbles showed up in London and we know for a fact that Keats went to see this.\\xa0 So, many, although not all, people think that he made up the jar- there was no jar or urn at all- but he wrote this poem about the Elgin Marbles housed, even today in the British Musuem in London.\\xa0 So, Garry, for those who don\\u2019t know about this 200 year old scandal= tell us about it.
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Elgin Marble
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Take a second and look this up= and go through it.\\xa0 We\\u2019ve actually been to the Acropolis museum where the space is.\\xa0 \\xa0
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So, we don\\u2019t know if there\\u2019s actually an urn so now \\xa0we\\u2019ll go on to the rest of the title- we do agree on the Grecian part-\\xa0 but the title is Ode ON instead of TO- creating again a bit of confusion- perhaps it\\u2019s the paintings ON the urn that are giving tribute to something, and since we\\u2019re not giving tribute TO the URN, I\\u2019m not sure we know what exactly were giving tribute to. But, the first word of the poem is \\u201cThou\\u201d \\u2013 so clearly he\\u2019s talking TO the urn in some sense- so with that bit of personification- Garry- how about reading for us this poem- stanza by stanza, and after each one, we\\u2019ll stop and chat about it.\\xa0 Now, this isn\\u2019t the BEST way to read a poem, if you were in a lit class, I\\u2019d ask you to read the whole thing and then go back, but since we only have a little bit of time and the poem is a little long-five stanzas of ten lines a piece- we\\u2019re going to cheat- and skip step one.
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Oh dear- but okay- I\\u2019ll read it\\u2026
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First thing to notice, and this is just doing it the easy way- when you want crack open anything- start easy and move to the harder stuff- so, just to get this out of the way- this poem is written in rhyme- easy to see.\\xa0 If you were to scan it, you\\u2019d see that is is abab-cdecde, pretty much all the way though with one exception.\\xa0 Now, that is something we could talk a lot about, but I don\\u2019t want to camp out there too much, but just to say, he\\u2019s borrowing the style of the two great sonnet writers -and of course, we all know sonnets are basically love poems- (Shakespeare and Petrarch)- he wrote the first half of each stanza like Shakespeares sonnets, and the last half like Petrarch (interestingly enough Petrach always had unrequited love- he was neve loved back, so tht\\u2019s a bit sad and a chat for another day)- but does give you a little bit of direction.\\xa0 It\\u2019s also in iambic pentameter- which is how sonnets are written as well- and as English people like to say- the beat of the human heart- ten syllables -barump
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Another thing to immediately notice is that this very fist stanza uses another literary device besides personification- one a little more obscure and \\xa0we call it an apostrophe- which is a Greek device\\u2014not the punctuation mark- but what it is essentially is when you talk to someone or something that can\\u2019t talk back to you.\\xa0 So, if I were to pick up my phone and say- stop ringing- that\\u2019s an apostrophe.\\xa0 If I were to holler at my daughter lizzy, who is away at college and accuse her of hiding my shoes (we wear the same size, but I would never do that) I would say, \\u2018lkizzy, whee are my brown booties)- when I know she can\\u2019t hear me- that\\u2019s an apostrophe.
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So, here he addesses three things on the urn- and look how strange they are- unravised bride of quietness, foster child of silence, sylvan historian- and hence begins the questions- what the heck is an unravished bride- oh my- why is she quiet, or is quietness the groom- what does that have to do with a foster child- what do these things have in common- and then the urn is called a historian.\\xa0 Sylvan is a word for a forest- so are there trees on the pot?\\xa0 But look even more closely- he says, \\u201cThose STILL unravished bride of silence- I think it may be a fun- she\\u2019s STILL unravished implying she\\u2019s getting eady to be ravished- however you want to read that- or maybe she\\u2019s still- like she\\u2019s quiet.
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What does it mean?\\xa0
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I know- you tell me- I want to point out a couple of othe things- notice how many s sounds there.\\xa0 Now, emembe, in poety- sound devices don\\u2019t CREATE meaning- a rhyme is a rhyme, an s sound doesn\\u2019t have meaning- but sounds support meaning- it makes the first stanza sound a little swishy- like its windy or something- \\u201cWhat leaf-fringed legend haunts about they shape of dieties or mortals or both\\u201d. Tempe is a valley in Greece and Arcadia is the rural part of Greece- so in the second half of this poem- the sexstet- what we have are a bunch of rhetorical questions and extra punctuations marks that speed up the tempo like the wind picking up \\u2013 and kind of take us from this unravished still bride at the beginning to wild ecstasy at the end.
What is he talking about?\\xa0\\xa0 I\\u2019m not really sure, but to me, it\\u2019s the exposition of a story perhaps that the urn is telling us.\\xa0 He\\u2019s getting us to look at the urn in our minds and thinking about it in t his way- this pot is a story- it was made by people, and the pictures on the urn are their stories- their legends, wee the gods, wee they mortals- are they reluctant, are the running, what are their sounds.\\xa0 It\\u2019s a nice thought.\\xa0
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Let\\u2019s go to stanza 2
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And that line is SO famous, \\u201cHeard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter\\u2019..a paradox- which is something that seems like it doesn\\u2019t make sense on first pass, but then it does.\\xa0 And of course, he\\u2019s evoking the beauty of the imagination- and how beautiful things can be in our own minds- this is kind of a bad analogy but the idea is like when you read a book, girls do this, and the love interest in the book is gorgeous, and as you ead the book you create this man to be absolutely the most amazing gorgeous man in the world..and then you see the movie\\u2026and the actor..is a mere mortal\\u2026he can neve be the beauty of your inagination\\u2026\\u201dit\\u2019s the same idea except with music- heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter\\u201d..so you can look at the musicians on the urn and in your mind they can be playing the most perfect most beautiful music in the world.. so \\u201cplay on..pipe as he says \\u2018to the spirit ditties\\u201d of no tone.\\xa0 And then of course, my personal favoite image on the whole urn\\u2026and the one I remember my college professor telling me about when I first heard somebody read this poem. He. Name was Dr. Susan Wink and she read this poem, explained this image and I remember it to this day.\\xa0\\xa0 Here\\u2019s the paradox- talk about this\\u2026.
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What do you think about that, Garry\\u2026\\u201dforever wilt thou love, and she be fairr!\\u201d\\u201d\\xa0 What about being frozen in just that moment for all eternity.
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Keats LOVED to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts\\u2026he said that himself- he calls it negative capability- he believes you must be able to confront the tensions of all the opposities in life without being annoyed by them or fighting them or trying to make them fit into nice logical boxes- life just isn\\u2019t like that-, and he really is bringing us to understand his understasnding hee.\\xa0 He\\u2019s going to say, just enjoy THIS moment- don\\u2019t stress about the next one- what if you could freeze it.\\xa0 And on that thought he takes us to the happiest place in the poem- stanza 3
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Look at all the repetition of the word happy here.\\xa0 Even the leaves ae happy \\u2013 you know why- if they are frozen on the urn- they never have to shed- if you ae frozen in one locked moment and it\\u2019s a happy moment- your favorite song never has to end- more love, more hap[y happy love- and I know all of us can probably think back to a special moment in time, that if you could =you\\u2019d freeze it.\\xa0
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