Please read “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and answer the following questions. If you finish, you may continue to read the poems listed on the assignment page or you make work on your Wordsworth sonnet essay.
An ode is a long lyric poem, serious and dignified in subject, tone, and style, often written to celebrate an event, person, being, or power—or to provide a vehicle for private meditation. Sometimes an ode may have an elaborate stanzaic structure. Almost all odes are poems of address, in which the poet uses apostrophe. This definition notwithstanding . . . the ode is perhaps the most freely defined of poetical forms, and odes vary markedly.
The ode was originally a Greek form used in dramatic poetry, in which a chorus would follow the movements of a dance while singing the words of the ode. Those odes often celebrated a public occasion of consequence, such as a military victory. From those ancient Greek beginnings, the form has descended through Western culture to appear in English divested of dance and song.
In English poetry the ode exists in one or two manifestations. Irregular odes have no set rhyme scheme and no set stanza pattern. . . . By contrast, the Horatian ode, named for the Roman poet Horace, follow a regular stanza pattern and rhyme scheme, as does “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”
1. Identify details of the scene (assembled by some to be a wedding procession) that is described in stanza 1 as the first “flowery tale” or “leaf-fringed legend” picture on the Grecian urn.
2. In the second stanza identify the next two picture groups on the urn by telling who is doing—or not doing—what.
3. In stanza 4 what other scene—perhaps on the other side of the urn—is presented?
4. When the speaker stands back and looks at the urn as a whole in stanza 5, what does he say will happen to the urn? What, according, to him, does the urn say as “a friend to man”?
5. What does the speaker think about the changelessness of art, which is made clear by the piper who cannot sound his tune, by the trees that cannot shed their leaves, and by the lover who cannot kiss his beloved? How does actual human life compare to life as captured by art?
6. Explain the note of sadness introduced in stanza 4. How does the effect of art here contrast with the effect of art in stanzas 2 and 3?
7. When the speaker calls the urn a “cold Pastoral” in stanza 5, what does he mean?
8. In spite of some of the negative qualities, what about art is so appealing to the speaker? In spite of our human limitations, why should we seek an ideal?
9. Some critics claim that the quotation marks beginning in line 49 should not end until the last word in line 50. What difference in meaning would that punctuation cause?
10. Who is the poem’s speaker? Who is he addressing?
11. What aspect of the ode as a format make it well suited to a meditation on a piece of art?
12. Read the last two lines of the ode. Who is addressing whom? Consider four possibilities: speaker to reader, urn to reader, speaker to urn, and speaker to figures on the urn. How does each perspective change the meaning of those two lines and the poem as a whole?
13. “Heard melodies” are those of the senses (hearing) while “unheard” melodies are those created by the imagination. Why are “unheard” melodies “sweeter”? How? How is this entire ode an expression of “unheard” melodies?