Explore the ways in which the power of the creative mind is portrayed in Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats and one other poem

Comparative Poem

The Tyger (William Blake)

What is ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ About’?

• speaker looks at a Grecian urn, which is decorated with evocative images of rustic and rural life in ancient Greece

• These scenes fascinate, mystify, and excite the speaker in equal measure—they seem to have captured life in its fullness, yet are frozen in time.

• The speaker's response shifts through different moods, and ultimately the urn provokes questions more than it provides answers

• The poem's ending has been and remains the subject of varied interpretation.

• The urn seems to tell the speaker—and, in turn, the reader—that truth and beauty are one and the same

What is ‘The Tyger’ About?

• consists entirely of questions about the nature of God and creation, particularly whether the same God that created vulnerable beings like the lamb could also have made the fearsome tiger

• The tiger becomes a symbol for one of religion's most difficult questions: why does God allow evil to exist?

• At the same time the poem is an expression of marvel and wonder at the tiger and its fearsome power, and by extension the power of both nature and God

Thesis

• Both Keats and Blake present the power of the creative mind by portraying it as a divine, immense force

• In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, Keats presents creativity as a source of eternal beauty and truth, that offers an escape from human morality

• Whereas, in ‘The Tyger’, Blake presents the creative power as dualistic for that acknowledges the coexistence of good and evil

Paragraph 1 = Both - Keats

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  • “Sylvan historian”

  • “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”

  • “for ever piping songs for ever new”

  • “thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought as doth Eternity”

  • “unravish’d bride of quietness”

  • “foster child of Silence and slow time”

  • “all breathing human passion far above”

  • “what…”

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“what…”

second half of the 1st stanza is a series of rhetorical questions to suggest that beauty captured in their scene is beyond human understanding

“Sylvan historian”

• the urn is personified as an Sylvian

• Sylvian was an inhabitant of the forest suggesting that this is the best narrator for the rural scheme depicted on the urn

“heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”

• suggests that the beauty of potential, what "might be," holds a greater emotional and artistic power than what is merely real

• imagery of sounds and contrast reflect the relationship between art and reality

• “heard” melodies symbolise the mundane reality which contrast the “unheard” which symbolises imagination and excitement from the unknown

• calling them “sweeter” reflects Keats belief that imagination is better than reality

• the paradox of “unheard” melodies captures Keats belief in negative capability- the unseen, unknown, unheard excites and is better

“for ever piping songs for ever new”

“thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought as doth Eternity”

“unravish’d bride of quietness”

“foster child of Silence and slow time”

“all breathing human passion far above”

Paragraph 1 = Both - Blake

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  • “what immortal hand or eye could frame they fearful symmetry”

  • “burnt fire of thin eyes”

  • “on what wings dare he aspire”

  • “what shoulder and what art”

  • “when the stars threw down their spears and water’d heaven with their tears”

  • “did he smile his work to see”

Paragraph 2 = Keats

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Paragraph 3 = Blake

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