For Friday's class, I want you to read one medium-length poem, John Keats' famous Ode on a Grecian Urn. I won't give you any questions now, but in-class we'll write about ONE of the stanzas in the poem. Which one? You'll have to see...so be sure to read it carefully and try to understand how he uses metaphors in the poem to compare to an abstract experience about life, love, time, loss, and innocence (you know, all the stuff Wordsworth talks about).
NOTE: Basically, this is a poem (an Ode, which means it's a poem composed directly in honor of someone or something) that celebrates an old Grecian vase in the British museum that Keats was fond of. As he looks at it, the poem reflects his thoughts about something so old yet so beautiful, that still seems so alive. Ultimately, the urn acts as a 'mirror' for Keats just as Nature did for Wordsworth in our last poem. What does he see in himself through the urn? What ideas does it make him see and project to the reader?
A few metaphors/ideas to think about:
* Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness/Thou foster-child of silence and slow time" (note that he calls the urn "Thou": how can an urn be a bride and a foster-child?)
* Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/Are sweeter" (how can the Urn make music, since it is "silent"? And how can silent music be better than music we can actually hear?)
* Why so many "happys" in Stanza III? Did he lose his Thesaurus?
* "Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity!" (how can an Urn tease us? And why is it similar to how "eternity" teases us?)
* " 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Who is saying the lines "Beauty is truth"? (why are they in quotations?) . Is this the true "thesis" of the poem? Is that really all we need to know? :)
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