Ode on a Grecian Urn

• Plot: “Ode on a Grecian Urn” explores the narrator’s contemplation of a Grecian urn’s scenes, pondering the stories behind them and the immortality of their beauty.
• Structure & Language Techniques: Keats uses the intricate structure of an ode with Iambic Pentameter and explores poetic techniques like imagery, alliteration, and paradoxes, to express themes of beauty, silence, and the permanence of art.
• Themes & Linking Poems: The poem explores themes of beauty, immortality, time, and the power of art, which connect it to other odes in Keats’ 1819 series, such as “Ode on Melancholy” and “Ode to a Nightingale.”
• Key Quotes: Important quotes include “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter,” mirroring the paradoxical nature of the poem and reinforcing the concepts of art’s silence and timeless beauty pursued in the poem itself.
• Poet & Context: John Keats, largely recognised as a key figure in the Romantic period, composed “Ode on a Grecian Urn” during the height of his creative power notwithstanding his personal struggles with illness and unrequited love, entrenched in a social backdrop marked by industrialization and evolution of art forms.