By John Keats (1819)
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone…
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
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!
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
Forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Analysis
Keats’s urn is both object and voice — a “sylvan historian” that holds a still life of desire forever in the tense just-before. The ode contrasts mortal time, where kisses end and branches bare, with the artifact’s time, where pursuit never reaches fulfillment and therefore never decays. The “unheard melodies” promise a perfection we cannot inhabit without losing change itself.
The closing aphorism has sparked centuries of debate, but the poem is less a doctrine than a pressure test. “Beauty is truth” arrives as a voice from the urn, not a law from the poet, and it must be weighed against the ache of human finitude. What the ode seals is a pact: art consoles by permanence, life compels by movement. We need both, and must endure their quarrel.