The excellence of every art is its intensity capable of making all disagreables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth John Keats Ode on a Grecian Ode is based on a series of paradoxes and opposites the discrepancy between the urn with its frozen images and the dynamic life portrayed on the urn the human and changeable versus the immortal and permanent participation versus observation life versus art As in Ode to a Nightingale the poet wants to create a world of
Ode on a Grecian Urn Summary In the first stanza the speaker stands before an ancient Grecian urn and addresses it He is preoccupied with its depiction of pictures frozen in time It is the still unravishd bride of quietness the foster child of silence and slow time He also describes the urn as a historian that can tell a story He wonders about the figures on the side of the urn and asks what legend they depict and from where they come He looks at a picture that seems to depict a group of men pu