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The Six Silences of a Grecian Urn
Eva T. H. Brann
Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a singable, a sayable, and, finally, even a
sententious poem--and yet it represents and enjoins silence insistently and
variously. In fact, I discern six modes of silence:
(1) The silence that surrounds the urn's provenance as the "foster-child of
silence."
(2) The silence of the urn itself as a bearer of legends, as a "silent form."
(3) The silence within its pictures, those "melodies...unheard."
(4) The silence of its world, the town whose streets "for evermore! Will silent
be."
(5) The poet's silence about the contents of the urn.
(6) The final silence enjoined by the urn's epigraph.
It is my purpose in the next few pages to detail the nature of these silences
and to speculate on what they betoken.
(1) Quietness and silence are not, to be sure, anything so generative with
respect to the urn as husband and progenitor, but they are its groom and foster
parent. Keats has a fine feeling for the rearing of an antiquity: Seclusion and
the long passage of time-that is, the parentage of an artifact insofar as it is
truly antique, while perennial intactness is its state.
(2) The urn, reared by silence, is itself a silent being, a "silent form"
striking a beautiful pose, a "fair attitude." Archaeologists are wont to see
vases anthropomorphically, especially amphoras such as this one. For this kind
of a pot has a mouth, a neck, two armlike handles, shoulders, a belly, and a
foot. This Grecian creature, in turn, bears a silent legend, a wordless story, a
visual inscription: The vase expresses its tale "more sweetly than our rhyme,"
but not very explicitly. Its stubbornly tacit telling elicits a storm of
questions, ten questions of the What? ,Who?, Where? sort. For although the vase
is a historian-a "sylvan historian." which is to say, a recounter of pastoral
idylls-it gives us no places, names, or dates (Brooks 156). Its idylls are genre
scenes.
There are three interpretations of the scenes displayed on and by the urn.
A drawing, attributed to Keats himself, of the Neoattic amphora in the Louvre
signed by Sosibios shows the typical Neoattic decorative system: a "brede" of
dionysiac dancers in single file all around the body of the vase (Vendler 17).
In the "Ode on Indolence," Keats sees three figures in his dream state:
They pass'd, like figures on a marble urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen shades return;
And they were strange to me, as may betide
With vases, to one deep in Phidian lore.
These dream figures, too, seem to form a continuous braid with those that appear
as the vase is turned, just as do the figures on the Sosibios vase. The
strangeness of these Greco-Roman figures on the dream urn (the Neoattic
sculptors produced marbles in Athens for the Roman market) yields on the Grecian
urn to the familiar Attic "Phidian lore." It is generally thought that Keats
borrowed one of his subjects, "that heifer lowing at the skies," from a
sacrificial cattle scene on the Phidian Parthenon frieze (Vendler 113). But the
compositional scheme, the discontinuity of the scenes, he apparently borrowed
from Attic pottery. Archaic or classical amphoras are not "over- wrought" with
figures; they bear two pictures, one front and one back, framed in the earlier
black-figure style and free in the classical red-figure.
Therefore, a suggestion that the urn bears three scenes, an orgiastic
pursuit, a courtship, and a sacrifice (Vendler 123) may be set aside. The text
can be read to support the classical choice: two distinct events. One is the
love chase of the second stanza (interpreted as identical with the "mad pursuit"
of the question in the first stanza). The other is the symmetrically placed
scene of sacrifice in the fifth stanza. As stanzas one and five speak to the urn
as a sentient being, stanzas two and four muse on it as the bearer of tales.
The main point is that the urn is questioned vainly about the particulars
of these scenes. Their location might be the valley of Tempe, or the mountains
of Arcadia--Tempe, the lovely wild Thessalian gorge of the river Peneus at the
periphery of Hellas, Arcadia, the rustic, wild, "bear country" in its interior--
the vase from the Attic center speaks of the romantic provinces. One may
conjecture about the names of the figures in the love chase: Daphne (whose
father is in fact Peneus) was chased by Apollo and was saved by being turned
into a laurel tree; perhaps the boughs that cannot shed their leaves are
laurels. But Daphne's tale is one of fear, not of happy love, and on the vase
there is nothing to mark the god. Nor can we locate the little town "by river or
sea-shore,/Or mountain-built.", In other words, just as nothing about the urn is
particularized-neither its date (which may be the fifth century or the first
century B.C.), nor its shape, nor its decorative scheme (which may be a
continuous braid or two discontinuous pictures)-so the pictures are genre
representations, incapable of responding with particulars to the queries of the
poet. What?, Where?, Who?, When?--that storm of questions is rebuffed by the
urn's implacable generality. Spitzer (88, n. 15) cites the poem "Kore" by Goethe
(written about the time of the "Grecian Urn," 1820), in which similar questions
are rebuffed in the name of the "inviolateness" of the work of art: the urn will
not give mere secular information.
(3) The third silence is the silence within the pictures, the "unheard" melodies
and "ditties of no tone," the silent panting, the toneless lowing. Just as the
silent urn can express its "flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," so the
unheard melodies depicted in its tale are the sweeter for their silence. It is
this silence of pictured sound that makes the poet meditate on the urn rather
than speak to it.
"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter": the mind runs
to all the paradoxes of our tradition--to Heraclitus' saying that "the unseen
harmony is better than the seen" (Kirk and Raven 193), to the silent Pythagorean
music of the spheres (Spitzer 78), to Plato's invisible forms. But those forms
are intelligible beings, the Pythagorean music consists of number ratios, and
the Heraclitean harmony is the all-collecting logos. They all are hypersensual.
Keats's unheard melodies, on the other hand, are not above the senses but are
eminently visual: visible, frozen music, sound transposed into visibility. The
silence of and in the pictures is the silence of sight.
(4) The fourth silence belongs to the world the urn inhabits, the world of
antiquity. Keats's accurate sense for the soundless romance of the antique comes
out especially in the fourth stanza, in the most poignant conceit of the poem
(Brooks, p. 161): the little town whose "streets for evermore/Will silent be,"
because its inhabitants have wandered onto the vase in a sacrificial procession.
Here, the poem breaks out of the surface of the artifact into its world-its
antique world, that is, the setting that it carries along insofar as it belongs
to bygone times. Here is what I mean. When you visit the ruins of ancient towns,
you see them devoid of figures: "not a soul to tell/Why thou art desolate, can
e'er return." Every ancient figure--man, woman, or beast-- that we know comes to
us on or as an artifact, be it of clay, marble, or words. Ancient cities are
essentially silent and unpeopled, as any connoisseur of the melancholy charm of
ancient sites knows.
(5) The fifth silence is the poet's own silence about the contents of the urn. A
vase is often a burial pot or a grave marker or a cinerarium. To think of an
antique urn is to think of a funereal function. Spitzer, probably having in mind
Keats's line "silent as a consecrated urn" from Eridymion (III 32), says that
the Grecian urn is "obviously consecrated to the ashes of a dead person" (73,
78n. 8). Again, he cites an apposite poem by Goethe, the first of the Venetian
epigrams (1790). Goethe says that the pagan was wont to decorate sarcophagi and
urns with signs of life:
Symbols, drums strike up, we see and hear the marbles.
Thus fulness overcomes death and the ashes inside
Seem in their silent precincts yet to rejoice in life.
The urn tacitly holds death within, as it allusively speaks of death in its
idylls. Arcady is the place of ecstasy, but its name is also a reminder of the
presence of death: the death's head with the legend "Et in Arcadia ego," "Even
in Arcady am I [death]," belongs to the traditional English conception of
Arcadia (Panofsky 310).
Moreover, the poet himself alludes obliquely to death. "When old age shall
this generation waste," the urn will survive to be a friend to mankind. Death is
a tacit presence in the ode.
(6) The sixth silence, finally, is the urn's reply in the last stanza to the
poet's assault of questions, the unspoken epigraph that enjoins silence.
Ancient monuments do often speak. Statues and grave markers carry epigraphs,
often elegiac distichs. The most famous speaking stone of antiquity was the
marker erected for the fallen Spartans of Thermopylae; Simonides wrote its
inscription. The translation--I do not know its author (Spitzer 91)--rings true
to the character of an epigraphic two-liner, although it does not quite preserve
the Greek elegiac meter. (I follow the now accepted reading that understands the
urn to be uttering not just the aphorism but the whole distich, (Vendler 312, n.
18.)
Tell them in La ce dae mon, pas ser- by,
Beau ty is truth,truth beau ty,-- that is all
That here O be dient to their laws we lie
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
All that this comparison shows is how well Keats's odic meter lends itself to an
epigraphic climax: it is the urn's second, verbal legend, the complement to the
"leaf-fringed legend" of the beginning stanza.
I say "climax," but several critics say "come-down" (Brooks 152). T. S. Eliot,
for example, calls the epigraph a "serious blemish" because it is either
incomprehensible or untrue.
It seems that the saying is not unmeaning and that it is, in fact, to be taken
as the burden of the ode, as its teaching, even its preaching. After all, the
poet addresses the urn when it is about to utter, as "cold pastoral," an address
in stark contrast to the mood of its pastoral idyll, representing love "forever
warm." The address "cold pastoral" means that the urn does not bear only sylvan
history, pastoral scenes, but a pastoral letter, an instructive communication to
the fold.
What, then, is the gist of its teaching, true or false? What does it mean to say
that truth and beauty are completely convertible and that this apothegm is the
sum of necessary knowledge?
That beauty is truth, or the portal to truth, is not a new or strange thought.
It is, for example, to be found in Shaftesbury and through him in Akenside
(Brann 1988: 10), as well as in Schiller (Spitzer 87, n. 14). The notion, so
obviously congenial to poets and aestheticians, has an ancient origin in a
severer philosophy. In Plato's Phaedrus, beauty is understood as Being made
manifest (250); sensual beauty gives direct access to the forms, not through the
"murky organs" of rational speech, as an ancient commentator explains (Hermeias
in Hackforth 94), but immediately, through vision. The meaning, through
variations, is that beauty is revelatory, that an object of beauty says
something, that it carries significance. But in the Platonic case-and in
Schiller's-being and truth themselves are beyond beauty. Beauty merely signifies
and gives access to the realm of perfect knowledge: "Only through the morning-
gate of the beautiful/Did you penetrate into cognition's land.../What we once
experienced here as beauty/Will one day come to meet us as truth" (Schiller).
Keats's urn, however, goes much further when it announces in addition that truth
is beauty, that is to say, that truth and beauty are mutually convertible terms,
hence identical. And it adds the preachment of faith and authority: "that is
all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." The urn's silent form does
indeed "tease us out of thought." Bowra (143) cites, by way of comparison,
Keats's epistle to Reynolds:
Oh never will the prize,
High reason, and the love of good and ill,
Be my award! Things cannot to the will
Be settled, but they tease us out of thought.
In the presence of beautiful things like the urn, we are coaxed to renounce
speech and reason, to refrain from importunate questioning, and, since a
"Question is the best beacon towards a little speculation," even to forgo
thought (Vendler Ill). "Truth beauty," the converse of "Beauty is truth," is a
metric throwaway and an apparently unmeaning, if not false, addendum for
the sake of symmetry, but it amounts in fact to a startling injunction,
startling, that is, in a verbal text: Silence! No questions! No words!
The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" belongs to a tradition going back to antiquity, the
tradition of "iconic" poetry (Brann 1988: 7), poetry in which eikones, visual
works of representational art, are described. A subgenre of this type, surviving
into modernity, is the Bildgedicht, or picture-poem, in which a work of art is
described and is made to speak to the reader through a pseudoinscription
(Spitzer 92, n. 17). Deeply involved in this tradition is a special aspect of
the old rivalry between poetry and painting (Brann 1991), between the invisible
word and the speechless picture. Can these preempt each other's function? Can
pictures narrate stories as well as words can paint pictures? Which art
encompasses the other, thus exceeding it in imaginative scope? But above all,
which one is the higher and truer?
Keats's iconic poem gives a remarkable answer. The visible in its silences is
truer than the audible and the verbal. Poetry and music fall below sculptured
marble (Vendler 305, n. 3). To be sure, there is a certain irony in the thesis,
since it is only through the poetic word that the urn is present to the visual
imagination, yet there is nothing ironic about the preference for visual beauty.
Why does Keats subordinate speech to sight?
Only one other ode has an odd number of stanzas, the "Ode to Autumn," which has
three. (The "Ode to Melancholy" originally had four stanzas; Keats canceled the
first.) A poem with a central stanza is apt to display an axial symmetty, as the
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" indeed does. Stanzas one and five, two and four
correspond. Consequently, it also has a precise, literal center:
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd. ...
At the heart of the poem is unconsummated love-unconsummated but not therefore
imperfect. This "art is a therapy because it temporarily calms the desiring that
turns neurotic for not having" (Lockridge, 406). What draws Keats to the visual
beauty of the vase seems to be its peculiar healing temporality, its special
stasis. This stasis is not that of timeless eternity, but rather it is like
eternity: a sempiternal moment, a frozen passage, not-yet turned into "for
ever," an unwearied anticipation, an unsated expectancy, a permanent
potentiality. This beauty knows death but holds it in abeyance; it is neither
alive nor dead, neither in nor out of time. The word "still," which occurs twice
in the poem, characterizes this stasis as "still enduring," "yet to come," and
"silent." "Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness" surely summons all three
meanings.
Words and music pass in time; timeless truth is not of the senses. What Keats's
demiparadise of marble beauty offers is the silent stasis of a visual moment, of
an ahistorical antiquity, of an unnamed idyll, of a never-ending pursuit, of an
unheard music, of an unconsummated love, of an ineffective death, of a
nonintellectual form. This is not philosophy's but imagination's paradise--the
attempt to establish a pure, high, and incorruptible realm of sensation:
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the
truth of Imagination-What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth-whether
it existed before or not-. ...
The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream-he awoke and found it truth. I
am the more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to
perceive how any thing can be known for truth by consequitive reasoning-and yet
it must be. Can it be that even the greatest Philosopher ever arrived at his
goal without putting aside numerous objections. However it may be, O for a life
of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is "a Vision in the form of Youth" a
Shadow of reality to come-and this consideration has further convinced me for it
has come as auxiliary to another favorite Speculation of mine, that we shall
enjoy ourselves here after by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated
in a finer tone and so repeated. And yet such a fate can only befall those who
delight in Sensation rather than hunger as you do after Truth. Adam's dream will
do here and seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal
reflection is the same as human Life and its Spiritual repetition. But as I was
saying-the simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its
own silent Working coming continually on the Spirit with a fine Suddenness-to
compare great things with small-have you never by being Surprised with an old
Melody-in a delicious place-by a delicious voice, felt over again your very
Speculations and Surmises at the time it first operated on your Soul-do you not
remember forming to yourself the singer's face more beautiful than it was
possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so-even then
you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high-that the Prototype must be
here after- that delicious face you will see. [To Benjamin Baily, November 22,
1817] (Forman 67-68).
Nothing could be more explicit. The rational truth of philosophy is to be
replaced by the rarefied truth of the imagination. Or, put in another,
complementary, way: This poet's homage to silence intends to alleviate the
burdens of romanticism by means of the categories of classicism: particular
history by generic antiquity, death by marble beauty, cloying consummation by
frozen pursuit, temporal sensation by silent stasis.
Appendix :
John Keats
Ode on a Grecian Urn
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?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on:
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Note:
This essay is an extension of a chapter from Thc World of the Imagination
(Rowman and Littlefield, 1991). Parts of that book served as text for a segment
of the NEH Summer Institute at Clemson University. I want to thank the members
of the seminar for new insights, and also Geotge Lucas and Patricia Cook for
making my stay fruitful and pleasant.
References
Bowra, C. M. "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in The Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1952.
Brann, Eva T. H. "Pictures in Poetry: Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn.' San Jose
Studies 14 (Fall 1988): 6-13.
-----."Poetry and Painting: Non-Mutual Sisters,- part 4, chap. IB, in The World
of the Imagination: Sum and Substance.
Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991.
Brooks, Cleanth. "Keats's Sylvan Historian: History Without Foomotes," in The
Well Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947.
Forman, Maurice B. The Letters of John Keats. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1952.
Hackforth, R. Plato's Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952.
Kirk, G. S. and Raven, J. E. The Presocratic Philosophcrs. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, l963.
Lockridge, Laurence S. "Keats and the Ethics of Immanence, " in The Ethics of
Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Panofsky, Erwin. "Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition, " in
Meaning in thc Visual Arts. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955.
Spitzer, Leo. "The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn,' or Content vs. Metagrammar, " in
Essays on English and American Literature. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University
Press, 1962.
Vendler, Helen. The Odes of John Keats. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1983.
From: http://www.stmarys-ca.edu/news_e ... rticles/brann12.txt |
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