theme of permanance and change with refrence of ode to gracian urn by keats?

Answer 1

The theme of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" relates to what Keats, in his long poem Endymion, called "the very bourne of heaven." Heaven's bourne is that experience (exstasis, some might call it) where the pleasures of time and eternity, of mutability and immutability, change and permanence, the sensual and the spiritual, coalesce. Only through the imagination or the experience of art can such an experience be realized by the finite human.

This theme is worked out in great detail by Earl Wasserman in his magnificent book called The Finer Tone. The chapter on the "Grecian Urn" is available online in a PDF. [1]

Wasserman says that the "intrinsic theme" of the poem is "that region where earth and the etereal, light and darkness, time and no-time become one; and what the symbolic drama ultimately discovers is the way in which art (the urn) relates man to that region." [p16] Wasserman works out this "symbolic drama" in great detail, too much for me to go into here. It is a superb (and early) example of close textual analysis, which was then called the New Criticism.

Briefly, the experience of heaven's bourne is achieved in stanza 3, esp. with the line. "Alll breathing human passion far above." By stanza five, the speaker has retreated from "heaven's bourne," but has come to an understanding of the role of art (the urn) in allowing one to enter such an experience: "Thou, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity . . . ."

What the urn leads the speaker to experience in stanza 3 is an "organic union" in which "flux and stasis--the ecstatic content and the neat ordering--blend into a powerful tension . . . to reflect the Dionysian-Apollonian character of heaven's bourne." What the urn leads the speaker to understand in stanza 5 is "that in art this insight is forever available," and it is "the height of earthly wisdom," "all that man needs to know, for it endows . . . earthly existence with a meaning and a purpose."

Read this entire chapter, and you may find not only the meaning of "Ode on a Grecian Urn," but ultimately the meaning of poetry, of art, of the experience of heaven's bourne.

Years and years ago, when I first discovered this essay as a sophomore in college, it turned a history major into an English major and a pre-ministerial student (somewhat disillusioned with religious doctrine) into an English teacher. I have never regretted that decision.

Answer 2

The poem is called "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and a good website is:

http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~evans/keats.htm

Answer 3

Hello Bush, you have a lot of literature to study, I have answered a few of your Qs, you can e-mail me if you want a more detailed answer.

These links will give you a summary of the book, character analysis, plot and much more, so that you will be able to answer literary questions.

For the Great Works of World Literature.

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http://www.bartleby.com/

http://www.homework-online.com/litguides.asp

http://absoluteshakespeare.com/index.htm

http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~jmcd/book/

http://www.4literature.net/

http://www.online-literature.com/

http://www.online-literature.com/author_index.php

Literature reviews

http://everything2.com/index.pl

English literature

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=57905&lastnode_id=124

Good luck.

Kevin, Liverpool, England.