John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a poem that rests largely on the author's powerful imagination, and therefore his extensive use of imagery is one of the most attractive elements of the poem. Keats seems to be fascinated with the mystery of art and views beauty and love as a pure and unchanging form. The poem contains many references to physical things. A casual reader might accept these at face value, but Keats modifies the traditional understanding of physical objects and uses them not as tangible articles but instead as metaphors for and connections to abstract concepts, such as truth and eternity.

This essay analyzes the text and searches for connections between the abstract and the tangible, and shows how in actuality physical things are perfect metaphors for abstract things.

I shall explore this connection through each stanza of the poem, Keats use of imagery, his possible reasons for writing this poem and the possible outlooks concerning the final and most ambiguous fifth stanza.

The poem starts with an introduction of the Grecian urn. The urn, passed down from centuries, exists outside of chronology - it does not age or die. This creates

Another arguable subject is the possibility of the urn being 'actual and tangible' which might have inspired Keats to write this ode. Or the urn could be purely fictional, that the creator of this imaginary urn was Keats himself, and the artwork and stories he weaves throughout the poem is a figment of his own imagination and doesn't really exist. By creating the urn, maybe Keats was representing a lifestyle that he always wanted to be a part of - a social circle whose adage was "Beauty is truth, truth beauty", and were in turn the words they lived by.

In the final stanza, the speaker reaches the conclusions from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed by its existence outside of temporal change, with its ability to 'tease' him "out of thought / As doth eternity" (Lines 44 - 45) The urn is a separate and self-contained world. This kind of aesthetic connection that the speaker experiences with the urn is another example of the concept of relating the abstract to the tangible.

The final two lines in which the poet imagines the urn speaking its message to mankind - " Beauty is truth, truth beauty" (Line 49) - has many interpretations to it. After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase no one can say for sure who 'speaks' the conclusion, "that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know"(Line 50). It could either be the poet addressing the urn, or the urn addressing mankind. If it is Keats addressing the urn, then it would seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations; the urn may not need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but the complications of human life make it impossible for such a simple and self-contained phrase to express this knowledge sufficiently. If it is the urn addressing mankind, then the phrase has rather the weight of an important lesson, that all mankind on earth should know that beauty and truth are one and the same.

a paradox for the human figures carved on it; they are free of time, but are simultaneously frozen in time. The Grecian urn is more than just a piece of pottery that Keats values because it has in some way defeated time and

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Approximate Word count = 1434
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)