Ode on a Grecian Urn: Style

Table of Contents

The ode is an ancient form originally written for musical accompaniment. The word itself is of Greek origin, meaning "sung." While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, the form by Keats's time had undergone enough transformation that it really represented a manner rather than a set method for writing a certain type of lyric poetry. In general, the ode of the  Romantic era is a poem of 30 to 200 lines that meditates progressively upon or directly addresses a single object or condition. 

In addition to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats wrote odes about the season of autumn and the song of a nightingale as well as about indolence, melancholy, and even the poet John Milton's hair. Keats's odes are characterized by an exalted and highly lyrical tone, and while they employ specific stanza forms and rhyme schemes, these can vary from ode to ode.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" consists of five, ten-line stanzas, each following a single rhyme scheme that combines the quatrain of a Shakespearean sonnet with the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet. Thus, the first four lines of each stanza rhyme abab while the predominant rhyme scheme of the last six lines is cdecde. 

The reader will notice that the sestet's rhyme scheme varies in each of the first two stanzas: in the first, it is cdedce; in the second, it is cdeced. In these stanzas, however, the poem's order and the hierarchy of its three principal symbols has yet to be resolved. In the third stanza, "wild ecstasy" yields a controlled interpretation of the urn's representations, and from that point, the sestets assume the traditional  Petrarchan order.

Thematically, Keats's attempts to compose the stanzas in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are just as their hybrid rhyme scheme would suggest. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the three quatrains present some problem or question to be reconciled in the final couplet. In a Petrarchan sonnet, a similar concept is reconciled in the last six lines. Thus, in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the quatrain tends to present a problem or condition that is addressed, explained or elaborated in the sestet. Consider, for instance, the first stanza. While the quatrain tells us that the poet cannot adequately express the "flowery tale" depicted on the urn, the sestet reveals why. The urn's pictures raise a string of questions that language alone cannot answer.

This website is designed to provide free notes and study materials on English Literature. The prime aim is to help financially weaker students with their ready references. Since a lot of different content writers write and contribute articles for this website, it’s quite tough to check and verify the originality and uniqueness of the content. There may be a few contents which are directly or indirectly copied/ plagiarized from other websites/ books/ journals etc. If such type of issues is noticed please don’t forget to inform us. We will immediately remove the content from our website www.engliterature.com. Our mailing address is admin@engliterature.com