Discuss ways in which Keats connects art and timelessness in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.

The first line of the poem immediately links the two concepts of art and eternity. The urn’s beauty is pristine, virginal. The subject of the poem, a work of sculptured art itself, is the urn. Keats the poet simultaneously recognises the eternal nature of urn’s beauty, and immortalises it himself in his own art. To Keats, the frozen nature of the scenes carved into the urn transposes them. The urgent questions which form the latter half of the first verse both add imagination and vitality to the text, and also further generalise the urn to the reader. The fact that Keats does not know the specifics of the scenes, and indeed seems to so enjoy not knowing, posits the urn as a sort of platonic ideal of a Greek work, an ur-urn in which all antiquity is distilled and frozen, both fully realised and forever on the verge of realisation. This impression is explicitly encouraged by the poet, who claims that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter” (note the teasing structure of the text, as the poet breaks the line after ‘unheard’, mirroring his own thesis), and again even more poignantly: “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”. Love is here separated, with the ardent, panting love of the revellers forfeited for the sake of the higher, artistic love of beauty. Art’s capacity for transcendence has exalted the fleeting joy of reality, crystallising it in timeless sculpture, eschewing the humanity of temporality, with its “burning forehead, and a parching tongue”. The “Cold Pastoral”, both artistic ideal in Keats’ minds eye and idealised by Keats’ art, is, by the end of the poem, clearly posited as a model for artistic immortality, a work which will last beyond the generations wasted by old age. In its beauty, it will continue to “tease us out of thought/ As doth eternity”, and lead us to Keats’ truth.