A Brighter Word Than Bright: Keats at Work

Urn; or, To What Green Altar

124 Urn; or,To What Green Altar To write the line “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness” ravishes the quiet bride. Keats opens “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in a dilemma similar to singing Psyche’s secrets back into her own “soft-­ conched ear.” Immediately, we find ourselves confronted with possibilities that undermine our assumptions of a poem’s relationship to its subject, and a poem’s relationship to who wrote it. The poem grows ambivalent . It seems not to serve the needs of self-­ expression of the one who composed it; it seems to betray in its expression all it would honor with its singing. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” exacerbates the discomfort of these issues as no other poem in Keats’s oeuvre does. TheUrn is a burial container; it is meant to hold the ashes of the dead. But as in all great poems, the nature of the palpable object manifests within itself a symbolic complexity always less than, and more than, palpable. That complexity must be felt in all its oddity for the poem’s meaning to be fully grasped. Grasped may well be the right word, for one of the aspects that marks the nature of this poem—so different than in the other Odes—is that the Poet is here holding the object of his concern.That object holds within itself, within the images of the brede that circle it, elements of every other Ode. In some profound sense, the Urn contains the other Odes—and so, not only does “Ode on a Grecian Urn” become a poem investigating its own peculiar crisis, but that crisis is composed of the other Odes. The poem asks a question about the practice of writing poetry, and its power is in its lack of abstraction. It questions itself in palpable ways—as palpable as the Urn in Keats’s own hands. It questions the other poems in sensible ways—as sensible as the “leaf-­ fring’d legend” that haunts its shape. That shape is haunted by young lovers—“deities or mor- 125 1819 tals”—that recall both Psyche and Cupid found in the poet’s thoughtless wandering, as well as the lover feeding on his mistress’s angry eyes in “Ode on Melancholy.” The nightingale ’s song transforms into “soft pipes” that play “spirit ditties of no tone.”55 Likewise, in the “bold lover’s” inability to kiss the maiden he loves we can feel Melancholy’s poison that the bee-­ mouth sips from the flower. Most significantly , we find that the three figures who, in “Ode on Indolence ,” turned thrice in circles before the lazing poet have here manifested the Urn from which they seemed to magically leap into existence. Keats holds in his hand—Keats as Poet, as allegorical also himself, but also Keats as a mortal man—an art object that contains ashes and also contains some residue of all the Odes. He holds it and questions it; he turns it around in his hand and looks. And this circular activity, of both hands and mind, provides Keats with a method to ask of Poetry those questions that riddle both poet and poem with doubt. It is the quietness of the Urn that troubles. Its silence isn’t merely the silence of an object, but the silence of an object personified: Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, Thou foster-­ child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme: What leaf-­ fring’d legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?56 The Urn takes its place among the long procession of brides that foster Keats’s erotic imagination. She is a bride differ- 126 1819 ent from any other—the bride is the object of art itself. To speak of this bride, to sing of her, is to consummate a marriage Keats dearlydesires: theerotic fulfillment of the loving poet to the beloved poem. But this bride resists the nuptial bed. Indeed, the Urn’s very symbolic nature—­ despite being ringed about with images varying from gods amorously chasing “maidens loth” to the nearly orgiastic “wild ecstasy”—betrays the erotic intention of the poet. It is...