John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” are almost antithetical poems. Composed in the same year, by poets born just three years apart and alike representative of such artistic values as we term Romantic, the poems might be expected to offer similar world views or philosophical values. They do not, not unless we declare the north and south pole of a magnet to be “the same” or void our coin flips because “both heads and tails are sides of a coin.” Shelley offers a paean to action, motion, and change; there is, or must be, a Spring to follow every Winter. Keats’s poem rejects not just fall and winter, but even the consummating revels that follow anticipatory Spring. Keats offers the notion that a still-life is richer and more real than all the thundering life Shelley desires.
Shelley speaks to his chosen West Wind in three line stanzas, as though at haste to speak and as though to rush his readers on. Wind moves, the poem moves, as even dead things (dead leaves) “are driven” (3) and “flee[…]” (3). Each of the first three segments of the poem ends with an “O hear!”---a cry, almost a shriek, which appears more a demand for his readers’ attention to his scenes of tumult than a cry to the Wind. In the fourth segment, as he attempts to communicate his own significance to the Wind, he offers more exclamation points, this time trying mightily to shriek loudly enough to be heard by the Wind itself or to make himself noisy enough to make the comparison apt.
But no, he is not the equal of his god, his mighty force of change and Nature. Even as he appeals, claiming himself “One too like thee: swift, tameless, and proud” (56), he begs not to be like the Wind, but to be his wild deity’s tool. He is or would be a leaf (53), driven like those dead dry leaves of the opening segment. He would be a lyre (57), sounding the Wind’s song rather than his own. He would accept its “deep, autumnal tone” (60), with all the sadness and suggestions of incipient death such a song implies. He claims to be an autumnal creature, his hair falling like the forest leaves (58); he has seen enough of this life’s pain (“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” 54).
It matters not, he has embraced his god of change though it be a god of destruction. It matters not because “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (70) and our narrator has placed all his faith and all his hopes in the “new birth” of his “dead thoughts” (63-64). Change at its wildest and most destructive is sought, because change is motion and life is change. Death is sought, for death must precede birth and the narrator’s thoughts must like seeds (7-8) lie cold and low, or must scatter as ashes from an unextinguished hearth (66-67). Without change there is no hope.
Keats speaks to his urn, an emblem of revels past that would put Shelley’s wildness to shame, in a quieter voice. Each segment of his poem is a single ten line stanza, inviting his readers to linger over his words and to, like him, linger over the vase. He speaks of “quietness” (1), “silence and slow time” (2), and the vase’s “flowery tale” (4). He asks questions (6-10) rather than screaming for attention, and sits as a bemused historian begging his artifact to speak.
The scene is perfect and the narrator, chained to unforgiving time, can only dream of taking the places of the figures on the urn. Their music is not the sweet “heard melodies” (11) which the narrator knows, but magically perfect “unheard” ones, played to the spirit rather than the “sensual ear” (11-14). The lovers of the second stanza, lovers who can never kiss, carry the gifts of eternal beauty, youth, and anticipation (15-20), as though the moment before the kiss is richer and more beautiful than any during or after may be. Our narrator sees them all: pipers, lovers, priests, celebrants, the leafy forest boughs, and even the heifer being led to slaughter. The picture is complete, though the melodies, the town, and all they represent exist only in the imagination of the viewer.
The narrator asks for nothing. That he sees the urn is for him enough. That it exists is enough for all. Beauty, in the form of perfect idyllic stillness, exists. That it exists only when confined to the still form of a painted urn is not only acceptable, it is desirable. That which is timeless does exist, and will carry its message to eternity, or so the narrator does proclaim (41-50). Its message is truth, for “’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’---that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (49-50). The message is not one that must be spread about the universe. Beauty need only exist, still and unchanging, on the face of that single urn where those who know to look may see.
Shelley claimed to be a Platonist, but his “Ode to the West Wind” reads as though written by the most frantic disciple of Heraclitus. The traditionally masculine elements, the elements of change, are wind and fire. This poem is a paean to wind, with some mention of fire. Earth and water, the (respectively) stable and rhythmic female elements, are mentioned only as stirred to life by wind. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn, however, Keats takes a scene which was likely painted in celebration of Dionysus, that god of Wind and Wine who occasioned the most frantic of revels, and draws from it a picture of feminine idyllic Earth, then draws from that picture the Platonist’s image of the Ideal Beauty and Truth, safe in the unchanging Realm of Forms.
In “Ode to the West Wind,” do we see a philosophy which embraces ever-changing life, or do we merely see the frustrated words of a social reformer gone wild? I am not certain. On firmer footing, however, I do suggest that in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” we see a philosophy of beauty, one that places Truth and Beauty in Plato’s unreachable and timeless Realm of Forms.
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Introduction: Establishes basis for comparison, and that the two pieces offer diametrically opposite views of a common philosophical theme (Is the "highest" Reality ever-changing or ever-stable?).
II. Shelley's poem
A. Structure & the sound of urgency
B. The "message": "I would be servant to the god of change"
C. More implications of the message
III. Keats's poem
A. Structure & the serene (pastoral and studious) tone of the poem
B. The description: the "perfect" scene
C. Implications of the description: "truth is beauty"
IV. Contextual summation: Shelley, Keats, and Greek philosophy & religion
V. Conclusion (very brief as the comparison was completed
in the paragraph immediately above it; the "Shelley said X" and "Keats
said Y" was all that still needed to be said).