This Sunday marks the second week that our church is doing a sermon series on the concept of beauty. Focusing heavily on God as creator and on the natural beauty all around us. As I am apt to do when someone brings up the concept of beauty John Keats’ words echo through my head. Mainly the famous closing lines of his 1819 poem Ode on a Grecian Urn where he closed it out by having an unknown speaker deliver the lines, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'”
In college I wrote several essays on this poem and a lot like the Bible it is one of those pieces of writing that you can return to time and time again and get something new out of it. As I read it over this morning I imagined Keats writing it knowing his death would be soon. Think about Keats as a young man approaching death.
Keats passed away from tuberculosis at the age of 25 two year after writing four of the best remembered poems of all time. Ode on a Grecian Urn is one of those, and while it doesn’t focus as much on death as Ode on a Nightingale it hints at the perspective of someone young facing death.
What is it that we say to the common 23 year old. Something along the lines of, “You still have your whole life ahead of you.” People might point out that life expectancy was much different in 1819 than it is now, but remove the infant mortality rate, deaths by unnatural causes, and from preventable diseases and I would imagine people of Keats class could live in their 60s, 70s, and even 80s. Keats was young, not just for our time, but for his time as well.
It is a rare thing for someone so young to come face to face with death. Look again at the poem and its scenes of beauty. The first scene that Keats focuses in on is of two lovers never able to kiss. Keats addresses the man in this scenario directly telling him that he will never have his bliss but his lover will never fade. This couple will never grow old together, but they will also never experience any of the joys of a relationship. And as anyone in a relationship knows those joys come with lots of turmoil. As the song says, “Life ain’t always beautiful, but it’s a beautiful ride.” Keats is looking at people who are always waiting in line and never get to go on the ride.
At this point Keats knows he is going to die. Like the lovers on the urn he is never going to experience many of life’s pleasures, but he also won’t face its despairs either. He is in the midst of living a life unfinished. Looking at the poem from this perspective brings out a more cynical or satirical reading.
The beauty of the urn takes on a cold nature. It is an urn after all, a home for the dead. It is the sealing and capturing of life. A place Keats is going to end up in two years time. So what does it mean when this unknown speaker at the end of the poem tells us that truth is beauty and beauty truth and that that is all we know and all we need to know?
This look on beauty is nearly a celebration of ignorance. This unknown voice tells us what is true and then tells us this is all we need to know. Don’t worry about anything else but beauty, but it is a frozen and heartless beauty. Look at the stanza that describes natural beauty, “Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu.” In this last stanza Keats returns to this and calls it, “Cold Pastoral.” Beauty in this form is not truth, it is death, but isn’t death truth. As Ben Franklin said the only certainties in life are death and taxes and isn’t certainty a form of truth. Death is certainly a truth for Keats.
The amount of times happy is used in the third stanza does read different when looking at the poem as a satirical work. Like Keats is saying, “Look at you so happy over there. What do you have to be happy about?” The tree will never grow out of spring. It will never know the beauty of summer or spring or winter. Think of a tree and its beauty in all these seasons. The blooms of spring are bright and colorful, but so are the leaves of fall or the ice of winter. Nature is a particular beauty that wasn’t meant to be captured and turned to the “Cold Pastoral.” It is meant to be living and changing.
In our more modern churches we like to say that God is love and when you remove the love from beauty what you end up with is the cold stillness of death, and that is what we see in Keats’ poem. Beauty as the cold stillness of death and not the living, breathing flow of the natural world. To have true beauty you don’t need truth you need love.
David Huzzard Writes 