Themes

The main themes of the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats are transience and eternity, and innocence and wisdom.

Transience and eternity

In the poem, the speaker lives in the transient world of “breathing human passion” (l. 28) which “leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd” (l. 29). This is a fleeting existence with generations that succeed one another “When old age shall this generation waste” (l. 46).

To the contrast, the world in the urn seems in many ways ideal, as it is eternal and full of hidden meanings. The speaker can only imagine why the maidens are chased, the sound of the piper’s song or the sacrificial ritual outside the little town. These events become eternal because they have been immortalised on the Greek urn. In that eternal world, nothing ever changes; love stays pure and the town remains empty. However, there are both advantages and disadvantages to this eternity. All things depicted there are only eternal in a static manner and people depicted on the urn perform the same actions continuously.

This perspective on eternity makes one reflect on whether eternal life in the real world would be similar to that depicted in the urn. Eventually, people would be repeating the same variety of actions over and over again, infinitely. Under such circumstances, free will would probably not have the same value as today, nor intense moments o...