Cold Pastoral!

The final lines of John Keats? Ode on a Grecian Urn, ??Beauty is truth, truth beauty?; that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know? do not fit with the rest of the poem and actually confuse the predominant message of the ode. In the introduction of the poem, Keats addresses the urn, the ?unravished bride of quietness,? a piece of pottery far outliving its maker, a tangible piece of history. He speaks to the urn as a whole, expressive of all its surface illustration. The second stanza brings an invocation of the melody of the painted pipes and a young man sitting playing them. The third, adoration for the trees and again the ?happy melodist,? piping ?More happy love, more happy, happy love!? The fourth stanza takes the reader to a different image, likely a different tier of the urn (as was typical of both Grecian and Roman urns). Here, Keats questions the sacrifice of a heifer, bringing an entire town into the narrative as he looks beyond the given context of the image. The fifth and final stanza makes the claim that the images are forever caught in time, a ?Cold Pastoral? of ?marble men and maidens? for eternity. What I find particularly puzzling is that after extensive description of what the figures on the urn are doing and the significance of their permanent fixture in time, Keats gives them a voice claiming Beauty to be Truth. He removes the men, gods and maidens from their individual contexts and gives them a unified voice that he has not supported through the rest of the poem. He finds the urn beautiful, a relic with seeming metaphysical value, this much is obvious. However, Keats takes a utilitarian expression of culture and turns it into an object of beauty with a voice disconnected from the figure narrative located on its sides. The figures are forever lost in their narrative just as Keats claims that their historic environments are forever lacking the figures (as with the ?little town, they streets forevermore / will silent be?). Albeit an object of beauty, the urn is little more than a cultural relic, a signifier of ancient stories and beliefs. I find it entirely implausible that this very urn would proclaim that ?Beauty is truth, truth beauty.?