Compare and contrast the speakers of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

Compare and contrast the speakers of ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

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In both the poems, ‘Ode On a Grecian Urn,’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ Keats presents the ideologies of eternal beauty through the use of music, concrete objects, and the images evoked through arts. Although he presents the speaker’s attitude and overall state of mind rather differently between the two texts, they both reflect the notion of a message and a vision being interlaced with an outer, static description (of an urn) or the images of a song within the images of poetry. These evoke imagination to both the speaker and the reader, which create a vivid vision of two differing mediums, yet allude to the same ideas, that beauty is repeated throughout history, regardless of its mortal, or immortal state.

Although the poems are both ‘odes’, they somewhat differ in atmosphere and the speaker’s state of mind at first, however both experience the willingness to escape the reality of human existence through the use of physical, figurative and imaginative beauty, and end in an eventual realisation and melancholy. As Gillian Beer states, they ‘share an emotional pattern’, whereby the reader experiences their active feelings, alongside the fluency of the poem, and there is a sequence of ‘the emergence from a state of passivity, which leads on to ecstasy until ‘the visions are all fled’ and ‘a sense of real things come doubly strong.’’ This is clearly illustrated in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ where the writer seems exalted with the idea that the work of lives of the depictions and images on the urn are eternally preserved in time, and gives a positive outlook as he is completely reassured of this by the urn’s unremitting antiquity through time. Yet, in the last stanza, Keats clearly emphasises the ‘doubly strong’ awareness that humans, being mortal, passing figures, do not last like the urn’s solidarity through time; ‘when old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe than ours’. The use of ‘waste’ indicates that we seem to fade away into the history of existence, unperturbed and unremembered, and that the ‘other woe’ of future generations becomes a cycle, that the ‘urn’ repeatedly experiences. He describes further the short-lived intensity of humanity as ‘all breathing human passion far above…a burning forehead, a parched tongue’ , which demonstrates the difference in attitude between his own existence and the urn’s; he is tormented by the strong sensations of human life, which leave us only with ‘a parched tongue’, that essentially ‘runs dry’ from the water of life, and the complete assurance of the urn, that experiences these things through the frozen, intense scenes of the humans upon the decorations. Therefore, he is in admiration, yet also becomes melancholic in his realisation that he must one day die. ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ however, begins with the speaker’s intent to be numbed of all feeling of reality, and to be frozen in time itself; it is ‘to reach an experience unlimited by mortality’, as he is too fully aware of his own death, and how life and nature will carry on after he is gone. The references of ‘hemlock,’ ‘some dull opiate,’ ‘Lethe-wards had sunk’ and ‘a draught of vintage’ all emphasise the effects of depressants and means of escape, in order to numb the overpowering sense of humanity’s fleeting nature, with illness and death. Both poems highlight this consciousness, described with negative details of human life and transience that contrast the beauty of the urn and the birdsong. The phrase, ‘fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget what thou among the leaves has never known’ reflects upon nature’s ability to live without worry, with ‘thou’ addressing the unknowing ‘nightingale’ itself, yet also the whole entirety of nature’s continual regardless. The speaker highlights the bleakness of humanity with an image of the aging process, and the ravishing of illnesses: ‘where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies.’ This conjures a scene of the rapid acceleration of a man through life, bearing the inevitability of death on their shoulders, which Keats is fully aware of, and the use of ‘spectre thin’ suggests a ghost like figure, that seems to fade away to a transparent, irrelevant waif in time. From Gilian Beer’s article, ‘Aesthetic Debate in Keats’ Odes’, it further highlights the poet’s yearning for an escape: ‘the poet seeks to escape from his ‘sole self’ and from the ultimately inward nature of poetry into a world of expressed sense objects. However, both poems reach an epiphany also; ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ concludes that this sorrow can be counter-acted by the beauty of poetry (‘not by Bacchus and his pards, but on the viewless wings of poesy.’) This depicts the poet defying the temptations and numbness of alcohol (from the god, Bacchus), to fully experience the human transience and pain through literature. The ‘viewless wings’ also allude to the speaker making the poems part of nature itself and the figure of the bird creating a melody, that is reflected in the poetry. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, although it is not a metaphorical epiphany, allows the speaker to be motivated by its eternal beauty that some things are not always forgotten, and moments can be captured in time through the visual arts.

Through the eyes of the poet, the speaker experiences an ignition into a realm of the imagination, in which he lapses between reality and the dreamy, trance-like state of his mind in both texts. Thus, these imaginations are experienced due to a main catalyst, which become the eponymous titles to each poem: the ‘urn’ and the ‘nightingale.’ However, in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ the speaker is actively given images upon the urns decoration, which provokes him to reflect on their lives, frozen in time. This is seen by his constant rhetorical questions, such as ‘who are these coming to the sacrifice’ and ‘what little town by river or sea-shore’ in the fourth that display his deepened exploration into the lives of the people presented on the urn. The quote, ‘the urn is utterly external; it is approachable only through sight’ from Gillian Beer, rightfully highlights Keats’ ideas that these images spark the imagination of the speaker into realising his own mortality from the vision of the urn itself; from these, another vision is created, which encourages the imagination of the reader also. these references to the similar actions of past people’s lives (‘what mad pursuit?’ displays a timeless love-scene, that is frozen, in the height of its human ‘passion’ and intensity.) Nonetheless, unlike ‘Ode to a Nightingale, the urn brings forth the imaginative enquiries right from the first stanza (what leaf-fringed haunts about thy shape of deities or mortals, or of both’), which demonstrates the extent to which the speaker is effected by its unchanging nature: he can read further and further into the lives of the depictions, yet their image remains the same throughout. The phrase ‘heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’ signifies that the speaker is unlimited to how far he can imagine them through the beauty of the urn; although the urn is a ‘plastic object’, it also remains to play an ‘unheard’ melody, that individuals can interpret differently. On the other hand, ‘Ode to a Nightingale, Keats portrays the speaker as being drawn from the depths of depression, and the Nightingale becomes an ‘action to imagination’, that induces him into a trance of sensorial pleasure. This is demonstrated in the fourth stanza, with the phrase ‘but there is no light, save what from heaven…through verduous glooms and winding mossy ays,’ and in the fifth stanza also: ‘I cannot see what soft flowers are at my feet’. These both illustrate the lack of ‘light’ or colour in the images that are described, which suggests that they are all like monochrome images in his head, yet the extent to their description leads the reader to believe that they do seem real to him, despite the fact that unlike the urn, there are no images given to the speaker; he is sparked to conjure these with the beauty of the birdsong, and there becomes a blurred line between reality and his ‘imagined world’ of the nightingale. In essence, while in this trance-like manner, the speaker feels like he has escaped from reality by indulging in the song and co-existence with the bird, which provides him with momentary joy: ‘now more than ever seems it rich to die…while thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad in such an ecstasy!’. He highlights this fleeting happiness with the word ‘ecstasy’, as although it accentuates the intensity of his emotions, it is usually used for something that is short-lived, and alludes that he will soon, like the birdsong’s ending, draw to a halt and come to a realisation. Thus, in both ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ the speaker is ‘tolled back’ by the strong awareness of their own fate, which differs from that of the urn and the birdsong. He realises that the urn will always remain, unlike his ultimate mortality, with the choice of ‘sole-self’ reiterating that he had momentarily felt ‘in ecstasy’ with the co-existence of the immortal birdsong. The speaker uses the phrase, ‘the fancy cannot cheat so well’, to draw attention that he had been tricked, or ‘cheated’ into imagining that it is, in fact, an unattainable reality. This is seen also in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, with ‘thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought as doth eternity’, as it displays the speaker’s emergence from the depths of his questioning of the ‘urn’ and its ‘silent’ words, that have once again entranced into a state beyond the limitations of human reality; he becomes immersed in the lives of the decoration, and is only brought back to his ‘sole’ existence by the realisation that the urn will last forever, yet he will not.

However, the representation of both the ‘urn’ and the ‘nightingale’s song’ both existing and remaining eternal through time seems to be the foremost important factor of the texts. In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ Keats portrays the object, with its ‘plastic form’ as concrete and unconcerned, with its beauty eternally preserved. In the first stanza, he personifies it as every generation of humanity: from ‘a foster child’ of ‘slow-time’, to an ‘unravished bride of quietness’, and then ‘a Sylvan historian’, which emphasises its utter solidarity through time; while the generations of humans pass through this quick process, the urn’s preservation of humanity through art remains. Furthermore, the image of a lover in pursuit for another being frozen just before the amorous scene unfolds displays Keat’s ideas that beauty and love can be stopped in time, when the person is still in their youth, through the use of the urn’s art, yet also through the art of poetry also; ‘she cannot fade….forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’. The poet reflects on the ideas that the youth of the women will be never be damaged or withered by old age or illness (as later linked to the current human reality in stanza five.) He further emphasises the contrast between the human transience and the boundless image of the lives in the third stanza, with the repetition of ‘forever’, and the illustration of nature too being immortalised (Ah happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed your leaves’) displays that even the surroundings to humans are passed through time by the urn, without ever changing or ending. This is also represented in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, however the bird itself is not an ‘eternal’ figure; like Keat’s, or the speaker, it must one day die. However, the representation of the bird’s song in nature is echoed through time, and this perplexes him. The phrase, ‘thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!…the voice I hear passing night was heard by emperor and clown’, displays that although the bird itself is not ‘immortal’, the figure of a bird singing a profound melody, and the continual circle of the life of an animal in nature is recurring, throughout time. The references to ‘emperor’ and ‘clown’ emphasise his direct belief that everyone, of every kind, has experienced the song of the bird, which draws attention to the message given that we all are but a small snapshot in the vast expanse of human existence. With this representation, Keats also creates both poems themselves into an art form, of which he wishes will be immortalised in time. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ the poem ultimately becomes a song, and like the birdsong, with its fluid description, and the pitches and troughs of its emotions being much like that of music. The plenitude of sensory description in the fifth stanza, as seen in the lines ‘the grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild-white hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine’ seem like the lyrics given to the wordless birdsong, and the phrase ‘I will fly to thee’ presents the speaker as a ‘bird-like’ figure also. Even if the creator of the song (the nightingale) is fleeting in its existence, the song recurring through time becomes eternal, therefore the creator of another art (the poem) should also survive through time, with the own beauty of their written words (even if their physical body ‘wastes’ and ‘fades’ away to a ‘spectre’. Gillian Beer states that ‘the poem becomes the song as it never can become the urn’, however this seems flawed; although the urn itself is an inanimate, concrete object, Keats is able to illustrate the clear images and lives of the subjects painted on its materialistic form, and the words shape the urn. The ‘fair youth beneath the trees’, ‘green altar’ and ‘marble men and maidens overwrought with forest branches and the trodden weed’ all present images of human life within the cold, unchangeable image of the urn, which further accentuates the difference between the eternity of its existence, and human’s short, individual timespan.

In contrast, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ each end in parallels to each other. The ‘Urn’ leaves the reader with a statement, that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ whereas ‘Nightingale’ proposes the inquisition of whether the speaker ‘wakes’ or ‘sleeps’, and whether it truly was a ‘vision’ at all. It could be suggested that Keats’ choice to end these poems, of which share the ideology that human life is not eternal, yet can be kept alive by the beauty of the arts, in such different manners is due to their overall representation. The ‘urn’ itself reassures the speaker that the characters on the paintings have been ‘kept alive’ by time, therefore the phrase ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ reflects Keats’ beliefs of negative capability, and the fact that beauty is seen through the urn to be unrelenting and that ‘those unheard are sweeter’ proves to emphasise that anyone can see the beauty of the arts unto their eyes, yet also the certitude of past lives being able to be kept still in time; he is comforted by the ideas that his own life could be preserved through his own forms of art (through poetry). On the other hand, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ the bird song is a fluid art, unlike the substantial eternality of the urn; it is fleeting, and then ‘fades past the near meadows’, much like he desires to ‘fade far away’ and ‘dissolve’. Consequently, the speaker is left to question whether he ‘wakes’ or ‘sleeps’; it could be concluded that he is not in a sole state, and instead he co-existents with the birdsong, and so he is uncertain of whether his own poetry will re-occur through time, or if it will ‘fade away’ too with nature’s (and his own) mortality.

Therefore, although the speaker’s share the same ideologies of eternality, the ‘urn’ is a certain, concrete form that he is sure will last forever, yet the ‘nightingale’s’ mortality becomes his main concern, and the blurred line between the ‘beauty’ and the ‘truth’ of its song. Keats performs a great skill of portraying the words of his poetry in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ to represent the co-existent form of lyric-less birdsong itself and his hopes that one day, his poetry will remain present, and ‘frozen’ in time, much like the urn which he too shapes with the questioned depictions of the lives of the ‘decoration’ humans. Thus, he exploits his own philosophies through the representation of other forms of the arts, and although he wishes to escape the brutality of human existence, he rejoices in the assurance that such things can be suspended in time, and their is hope in the ‘beauty’ and ‘truth’ of both life and literature. Ultimately, the speaker creates ideas that stretch far further than a simple description; the birdsong does not simply represent music, but the dream-like state of mind and its recurring state through time (like his poetry) and the urn is not seen as a sole terra-cotta ornament, but a symbol of perpetual existence, which inspires his certainty in the hope of eternal beauty (and the human life) forever more.