Browning's Career to 1841: The Theme of Time and the Problem of Form

Abstract

In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Keats describes how, in the moment of contemplation, the poet is conscious of his limitations as an earthbound creature, one of a generation which “old age shall … waste,” one who has felt the moment of “human passion … / That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” By contrast, the urn suggests the power of art to prolong the moment, to render permanent what is transitory, to recreate endlessly for one generation after the next the passion of human love. But the urn itself may not last forever; it is a “sylvan historian” which is itself the product of the “slow time” of human history, an artifact which commemorates a moment in the life of its creator and emulates eternity without itself being eternal (“Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity …”). It is a “still unravish'd bride of quietness,” but if we dwell on the ambiguous “still,” we sense that like the Elgin marbles, the urn may be subject to “the rude / Wasting of old Time,” a hint at the “magnitude of eternity” which impresses on the poet a sense of his mortality.