st stanza, he examines the picture of the “mad pursuit”
and wonders what actual story lies behind the picture: “What men
or gods are these? What maidens loth?” Of course, the urn can never
tell him the whos, whats, whens, and wheres of the stories it depicts,
and the speaker is forced to abandon this line of questioning.
In the second and third stanzas, he examines the picture
of the piper playing to his lover beneath the trees. Here, the speaker
tries to imagine what the experience of the figures on the urn must
be like; he tries to identify with them. He is tempted by their
escape from temporality and attracted to the eternal newness of
the piper’s unheard song and the eternally unchanging beauty of
his lover. He thinks that their love is “far above” all transient
human passion, which, in its sexual expression, inevitably leads
to an abatement of intensity—when passion is satisfied, all that
remains is a wearied physicality: a sorrowful heart, a “burning
forehead,” and a “parching tongue.” His recollection of these conditions
seems to remind the speaker that he is inescapably subject to them,
and he abandons his attempt to identify with the figures on the
urn.
In the fourth stanza, the speaker attempts to think about
the figures on the urn as though they were experiencing
human time, imagining that their procession has an origin (the “little
town”) and a destination (the “green altar”). But all he can think
is that the town will forever be deserted: If these people have
left their origin, they will never return to it. In this sense he
confronts head-on the limits of static art; if it is impossible
to learn from the urn the whos and wheres of the “real story” in
the first stanza, it is impossible ever to know
the origin and the destination of the figures on the urn in the
fourth.
It is true that the speaker shows a certain kind of progress
in his successive attempts to engage with the urn. His idle curiosity
in the first attempt gives way to a more deeply felt identification
in the second, and in the third, the speaker leaves his own concerns
behind and thinks of the processional purely on its own terms, thinking
of the “little town” with a real and generous feeling. But each
attempt ultimately ends in failure. The third attempt fails simply
because there is nothing more to say—once the speaker confronts
the silence and eternal emptiness of the little town, he has reached
the limit of static art; on this subject, at least, there is nothing
more the urn can tell him.
In the final stanza, the speaker presents the conclusions
drawn from his three attempts to engage with the urn. He is overwhelmed
by its existence outside of temporal change, with its ability to
“tease” him “out of thought / As doth eternity.” If human life is
a succession of “hungry generations,” as the speaker suggests in “Nightingale,”
the urn is a separate and self-contained world. It can be a “friend
to man,” as the speaker says, but it cannot be mortal; the kind
of aesthetic connection the speaker experiences with the urn is
ultimately insufficient to human life.
The final two lines, in which the speaker imagines the
urn speaking its message to mankind—”Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”
have proved among the most difficult to interpret in the Keats canon.
After the urn utters the enigmatic phrase “Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,” no one can say for sure who “speaks” the conclusion, “that
is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” It could be
the speaker addressing the urn, and it could be the urn addressing
mankind. If it is the speaker addressing the urn, then it would
seem to indicate his awareness of its limitations: The urn may not
need to know anything beyond the equation of beauty and truth, but
th