Bodily Harm: Keats’s Figures in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

Abstract

BODILY HARM: KEATS’S FIGURES IN THE “ODE ON A GRECIAN URN’ M A R J O R I E G A R S O N University of Toronto IC eats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is constructed upon two principal rhetor­ ical figures. Beginning with a triple apostrophe — “Thou still unravish’d bride,” “Thou foster-child,” “Sylvan historian” — and going on to apostro­ phize “ye soft pipes,” “Fair youth,” “Bold lover,” “happy boughs,” “happy melodist,” “happy love,” “mysterious priest,” “little town,” and, in the last stanza, the urn itself again ( “O Attic shape,” “silent form,” “Cold Pastoral” ) — the speaker addresses directly just about every noun in the poem, with the exception of the female victims of its action, the maiden — or maidens — in the first design and the heifer led to the sacrifice in the second. Keats’s second important figure is the rhetorical question. The poem moves in the first stanza into a series of such questions: What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape . . . ? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?1 And it continues, in the fourth stanza, around to the other side of the urn: “Who are these coming to the sacrifice?” To what altar is the heifer being led? From what town has the procession come? Apostrophe is an address to the absent as if present, the inanimate as if animate; a rhetorical question is one to which no answer is expected. These are figures of power.2 To use them is to address someone who cannot talk back — a strategy that ensures not only that you will have the last word, but that your discourse will manifest a high degree of “literariness” (Scholes). Indeed, Keats’s poem announces its aspirations to literariness in every way. To write an ode was to appropriate the language of cultural power; to write an ecphrastic poem was in 1819 to employ a fashionable form with distinct academic and class associations.3 What better genre could be chosen by a young poet ardently hoping for membership in a pantheon from which his detractors had sought to exclude him at least partly on grounds of social class?4 A successful attempt to capture in words a cultural icon like the urn would win him permanent place of honour in a culture that had invested heavily in such artefacts and in the values they had been made to stand for. English Stu d ie s in Ca n a d a , x v ii, i , March 1991 The attempt was, of course, inordinately successful. Praised for its “Greekness ” in the nineteenth century (Rhodes 6), the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” has in the twentieth been accorded uncontrovertible classic status: the status of an art object that, liberated from the exigencies of history, at once embodies and laments the permanent paradoxes of the human condition, of time and eternity, love and death, art and life, finally dissolving them in a totaliz­ ing formula that reaches beyond the material into a transcendental realm of Platonic Idealism. The poem becomes what it beholds: like the urn, like Stephen Dedalus’s basket, it is a “rhythmic” whole bounded by an invisible line that cuts it off from its background, renders it a self-sufficient object of aesthetic contemplation (Joyce 212) — and, in the 1940s, the ideal focus of New Critical attention. This impression of universality and of aesthetic self-sufficiency owes much no doubt to the West’s construction of the “Grecian.” The nineteenth cen­ tury tended to project upon the Greeks a wholeness, harmony, and radiance, a balance and integritas (Joyce 212) that more modern cultures are felt ir­ revocably to have lost. From Schlegel, who began the first of his Lectures in Dramatic Art and Literature by asserting that “The whole of their art and their poetry is expressive of the consciousness of this harmony of all their faculties” (1.12), to Arnold, who praised the Greek “idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides” (5.99), and who found Greek art, sculpture, drama, architecture, character, and culture to...