"Ode on Grecian Urn"

                 "Ode on Grecian Urn"


The poet or the speaker is standing before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it. His attention is focused on the depiction of pictures on the urn . He describes the urn as a historian tells a story. He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what story they depict and from where they come. He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men following a group of women and wonders what their story could be.
Next the speaker looks at another picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a pipe, lying with his lover under a tree. The poet says that the piper’s unheard melodies are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are unaffected and unchanged by time. He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his lover because he is frozen at one place, he should not feel sad, because her beauty will never remove from her face. Next, he looks at the trees surrounding the lovers and feels happy that leaves will never fall from the trees. He is happy for the piper because his songs will always remain New and happy that the love of the boy and the girl will last forever, not like worldly love, which decreases with the decreasing years towards death and eventually vanishes, leaving behind only a burning forehead, and a dry tongue.
Next, the speaker sees another picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers leading a heifer( young one of a cow) to be sacrificed. He wonders where they are going and from where they have come. He thinks in his mind their little town, empty of all its citizens, and tells it that its streets will forever remain silent, for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never return.
In the last stanza, the speaker again addresses the urn itself and calls it an Eternal thing. He thinks that when his generation is long dead, the urn will remain, telling future generations its puzzling lesson
“Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.”
The speaker says that that is the only thing the urn knows and the only thing it needs to know and this thing will always remain with urn..








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