The poem describes scenes depicted on an ancient Greek urn, including lovers in a forest glade and villagers leading a sacrifice. The speaker wonders about their stories and muses that the urn has captured these moments in eternal stillness outside of time. He envies the urn's ability to preserve beauty without change or decay. The poem ends with the urn uttering the cryptic message "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," leaving the meaning open to interpretation.

1. JOHN KEATS
A poet of
beauty

2.  John Keats, one of the greatest English poets
and a major figure in the Romantic movement
 born in 1795 in Moorefield, London.

3.  His father died when he was eight
 his mother when he was 14;
 these sad circumstances drew him
particularly close to his two brothers,
George and Tom,
and his sister Fanny.

4.  1803 enters John Clarke’s School
at Enfield
 Becomes friends with Charles
Cowden Clarke
 Clarke encourages Keats’s interest
in reading
 Translation of Virgil’s Aeneid
 Imitation of Spenser

5.  in 1810, he is apprenticed to the
apothecary Surgeon.
 1815 trains at Guy’s Hospital
 1816 begins work as a dresser
 Continues to read poetry and publishes
his first poem, “Ode to Solitude”

6.  Keats publishes his first volume Poems
 Meets Wordsworth for the first time

7.  Crisis year for Keats
 Keats toured the north of England and Scotland.
Returning home to nurse his brother Tom, who
was ill with tuberculosis. After Tom's death in
December he moved into a friend's house in
Hampstead, now known as Keats House.

8.  Met and fell in love with a neighbour,
Fanny Branwne.
 During the following year ,despite
the ill health and financial
problems, he wrote an astonishing
amount of poetry 'La Belle Dame
sans Merci', `Ode to a Nightingale'
and `To Autumn'.

9.  In July 1820 his second volume of poems
appeared.
 In November 1820, Keats and his friend
Joseph Severn arrived in Rome, after an hard
journey, but by early December he was
confined to bed, extremely ill with a high
fever.

10.  Friend nursed him
devotedly
throughout the next
few distressing and
painful weeks. Keats
died
peacefully, clasping
his friend's hand, on
23 February 1821.

12.  The “full-throated ease” leads Keats to the
dream of an extremely enjoyable summer of
“Dance and Provencal song, and sun burnt
mirth”. This image of dance, music, and
rollicking fun is heightened by the contrasting
reference to human misery, “weariness, the
fever and the fret”.

13.  In this world “where men sit and hear each
other groan” is the exact opposite of dance,
song and happiness. The image of human
misery is very profound when Keats alludes to
his brother’s death: "Where youth grows pale ,
and spectre-thin and dies; Where but to think is
to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs".

15. Ode on Grecian Urn

16. This ode contains the most discussed two lines in all of
Keats's poetry

17.  Content:
 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 unravish'd 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.

18.  Content:
He looks at a picture that seems to depict a
group of men pursuing a group of women and
wonders what their story could be:
"What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? /
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?"

19.  In the second stanza, the speaker looks at another
picture on the urn, this time of a young man playing a
pipe, lying with his lover beneath a glade of trees.
 The speaker says that the piper's "unheard" melodies
are sweeter than mortal melodies because they are
unaffected by time.
 He tells the youth that, though he can never kiss his
lover because he is frozen in time, he should not grieve,
because her beauty will never fade.

20.  In the third stanza, he looks at the trees surrounding
the lovers and feels happy that they will never shed
their leaves.
 He is happy for the piper because his songs will be "for
ever new," and happy that the love of the boy and the
girl will last forever, unlike mortal love, which lapses
into "breathing human passion" and eventually
vanishes, leaving behind only a "burning forehead, and
a parching tongue."

21.  In the fourth stanza, the speaker examines another
picture on the urn, this one of a group of villagers
leading a heifer to be sacrificed. He wonders where
they are going ("To what green altar, O mysterious
priest...") and from where they have come.
 He imagines their little town, empty of all its citizens,
and tells it that its streets will "for evermore" be silent,
for those who have left it, frozen on the urn, will never
return.

22.  In the final stanza, the speaker again addresses
the urn itself, saying that it, like Eternity, "doth
tease us out of thought.
 " He thinks that when his generation is long
dead, the urn will remain, telling future
generations its enigmatic lesson: "Beauty is
truth, truth beauty." The speaker says that that
is the only thing the urn knows and the only
thing it needs to know.

23.  The final two lines, in which the speaker
imagines the urn speaking its message to
mankind--"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," have
proved among the most difficult to interpret in
the Keats canon.
 After the urn utters the mysterious phrase
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," no one can say
for sure who "speaks" the conclusion, "that is
all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know."