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So, since I don't really have any new thoughts today, I'm posting a more detailed version of my response to "Ode on a Grecian Urn" from last week. I guess I get a little pedantic when discussing this poem, but it's only because I care.
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The ending to this poem is very famous, but these days the consensus seems to be that Keats dodges the questions he raises and is full of sh*t. This blows my mind. As far as I can see, Keats resolves his poem perfectly; he doesn't answer the original questions because they are quite simply the wrong questions. To put it oversimplistically (which is something I'm pretty good at), his "point" is that the truth conveyed by art, which may be the only truth that's really possible, is (at least experientially) nontemporal rather than temporal. Critics whose orientation is 100% social-historical miss this point, because they can't conceive of anything that doesn't exist in time.
The questions about what is happening in the urn's images cannot be answered. Such knowledge died with the urn's creators; such knowledge belongs to the mortal, temporal world, as does the plaintive speaker of the poem. Keats asks the questions in order to display the tragic fact of their unanswerability. He invites the reader to try to imagine these narrative, temporal details, so as to then pull the rug out from under the reader, forcing her/him to make the same shift the speaker makes. "We can't know those answers," he implies, "but maybe we can know something else." So the speaker turns to the kind of truth that art can and does communicate. Its "silent form . . . [teases] us out of thought," so that it is possible to apprehend something that has variously been called both beauty and truth. Art can't save us from death, but it can show us something that never dies.
Basically, this is just a variety of Platonism, which rubs some people the wrong way (or, perhaps, doesn't rub them at all). Some might say the ending is a false consolation; such critics would argue that the proper conclusion, once the speaker has realized the impossibility of truly knowing the temporal world, is to admit that there is no such thing as truth at all. For them, "heard melodies" are the only melodies there are. But Keats wants to redefine beauty and truth (or at least return them to a quasi-Platonic sense). This isn't the kind of beauty that has "ugly" (or anything else) as its opposite; this isn't the kind of truth that has "false" (or anything else) as its opposite. In other words, it's not about judging what is or isn't "beautiful" or "true"; the judging mind has no place here. It's about being struck between the eyes with a perception of reality so powerful and so fresh that it seems reality has been properly and genuinely communicated. It's a different order of experience. For Keats, art can provide this. An experience of seeming timelessness is available to consciousness, and Keats somewhat desperately seizes upon this option as a consolation for the pain of loss and time. But it's a legitimate consolation.
The great thing about Keats is that for him, beauty always resided smack dab in the midst of the most sensual experience. In his version of Platonism, one does not leave "this world" behind in favor of some de-sensualized intellectual dimension. Rather, one finds beauty here and now, and in so doing one somehow transcends temporality even while immersed within it. No ladder is necessary, because there's nowhere else to go—certainly nowhere better than here, as long as one has poetry to provide the unheard melodies.
I like to think of this poem in combination with a much more informal little poem called "This Living Hand":
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.
I find this one especially haunting. It makes his search for timeless beauty and truth in "Grecian Urn" that much more poignant. The final truth of "Grecian Urn" is that one can partake of eternity through art, but one must be alive to do so. That beauty is truth is all we know and need to know on earth. For Keats, eternity is only for the living.
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