“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all/  Ye know on earth, and all

ye need to know.— Explain/ Theme/ Central idea.

Ode On A Grecian Urn was written in the spring of 1819 and published later that year in Annals of the
Fine Arts. This beautiful ode focuses on art, beauty, truth and time. It is,one of Keats’ five odes,
considered to be some of the best examples of romantic poetry. The features of Keatsian Romanticism
and Keats’ philosophy of art, beauty and truth are also important in this poem. Like Wordsworth’s
nature, Keats’ imagination is a means to understand life, a means of the quest for truth and beauty, and
the most reliable mode of experience and insight. The speaker in the poem begins with reality- an
ancient marble urn with engravings around it. He addresses to the urn as a virgin bride of quietness.The
carving around the urn is expressing the story of the pilgrims, lovers and other mysterious people. In the
poet’s imagination, this world and people are made immortal and beautiful by art.

This ode which represents Keats' mature vision consists of one of his central philosophical doctrines of
art itself: “Truth is Beauty and beauty truth”. The same statement is found in one of his early letters to a
friend Benjamin bailey on 22 November 1817 he wrote: “what the imagination seizes as beauty must be
truth – whether it existed before or not. “ This famous maxim of Keats has an intellectual basis of truth
and also an emotional basis in beauty. Art may appeal to the sensuousness or just the emotion of
common people, but Keats’ response extends from the sensuous to the spiritual and from the
passionate to the intellectual. Keats establishes a balance between the real and the ideal, and art and
life, and he finds the deepest of reality in its balance. This ode gives a much importance to passion as to
the idea of permanence. It is not a lyric of the escape of a dying young man, unwilling to face bitter life
into the realm of everlasting happiness, but it is a poem that embodies his mature understanding.

In the Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats tries to state that neither the beauty of nature nor the beauty of art
can console us for the miseries of life. The life of the figures on the urn possesses the beauty; the
significance, and the externality of art; and this, in the third stanza explicitly, and throughout the poem
implicitly, is contrasted with the transitory-ness, the meaninglessness, and the unpoetic nature of actual
life. Keats' ode is a reminder of the age of romanticism and the idea that art could be the salvation of
humankind, an expression of deep spirituality. The ode explores Keats' notion of art being forever
beautiful, beyond the grasp of time and inevitable decay, unlike we humans, creatures of flesh and
blood, struggling with day to day reality.

Keats closes the poem with the chiasmus: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know”. It is not clear if this phrase is said by the urn or by the poet. Whatever it may
be, the simple logic behind these two lines is that the essence of truth and beauty lie not in an imaginary
world rather in real life. Keats’s aphorism is that no truth can be ugly; every truth is beautiful or
pleasant. To Keats it is a great discovery which the urn will teach the mankind forever. This ode takes us
far away from the real world to the world of eternity and conveys the message that art is superior to
nature in the sense that art is permanent while nature or human life is transitory. The joy of art is
forever while the joy of real life is limited. So an urn, a Grecian urn greatly inspired Keats to produce
such a beautiful poem which definitely contains the warmth of truth. Bowra says, “The meaning of this
message is beyond dispute. Mr. Garrod rightly paraphrases it, ‘there is nothing real but the beautiful and
nothing beautiful but the real.’ Truth is another name for ultimate reality, and is discovered not by the
reasoning mind but by the imagination.”