Keats's  "Ode on a Grecian Urn"  is only one of the very famous poems this author wrote before dying at age 26.  Like Whitman and Wordsworth, Keats was a master of the long meditation, soaring from some perception or event--a thought from childhood (Wordsworth), the death of a hero (Whitman) or the sight of an ancient Greek vase--to ever widening imaginative associations.  In this poem Keats seems to celebrate the power of art and of the imagination, but the final stanza also forces us to ask questions:  does the artistic achievement Keats portrays (or imagines) really connect to daily life, or is its "cold pastoral" in some way less real and meaningful than it seemed in the early stanzas?  There is no sure answer, and the quotation marks in this last stanza confuse more than they assist   (see the footnotes to the poem).

This is one of the most famous poems from the Romantic era, inventing or imagining a scene from ancient Greek art to construct a meditation on the nature of beauty. In this poem, imagination is everything: note that even "unheard melodies" are "sweeter" than anything we really hear.

This poem exemplifies some of the features of English romanticism sketched out at xxx:

This is a pastoral scene, one in the countryside. The characters are viewed as departing a town to come to a scene of animal sacrifice in the countryside.

Imagination and "dream" rather than analytic intellect: the figures on the vase or bowl are imagined--as the footnote to the poem states, the poem describes no single known Greek vase, but associatively pulls together scenes from a number of these, then imagines the emotions of characters on the vase.

In the discussion board, I'll ask you to discuss some of these imagined emotions.

Now, note the poet's language. The first stanza is full of implied comparisons or metaphors: what, after all, do the following phrases mean?