Packing books for a move across town, I take a moment to read 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'

Keats’s poem is more elegy than ode.

Keats is said to have taken his inspiration for the elegy from several scenes depicted on the outside of the ancient urn.

What’s said in the poem is legendary—Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. That is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know, among other things.

What’s unsaid in Keats’s poem is inside the urn, as crucial to the poem, it seems to me, as what’s said. What’s inside the urn the poet never says; Keats never turns the urn upside down and shakes it to see what might fall out. Perhaps another version of the past is inside the urn—emptiness itself or a few twigs from an olive tree, a small pile of ashes, the butt of a cigarette smoked by W.H. Auden.

During this move my life has been made up of so many things I don’t know what to do with, yet all of its rooms are now empty.

Moving from one home to another is more elegy than ode. August 2, 2021. Photo by author.