Close-Reading Exercise: A Good Bad Reading of Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Part V

[Being the fifth installment of my insanely close reading of Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn."  You can find the first here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here.  You should also check out Ray's excellent response.]

The fifth stanza opens with the speaker addressing the urn:

O Attic shape! Fair Attitude! with brede
  Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;  
  Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As dost eternity ...

The speaker addresses the urn with the exclamatory "O Attic shape!" or "This is what you look like!" (41).  Here he draws our attention away from the imagined scenes of empty towns which closed the fourth stanza and returns to the urn with an emphasis on its materiality.  This thing, with its Attic shape and fair attitude, is a dead thing.  It possesses the power to inspire, but the speaker reminds us—with an insistence reminiscent of the happy, happy, happy third stanza—that this power is not inherent in the dead thing before us.  Sure, it possesses a "Fair Attitude!" what with its tangled "brede" (think "braid") of "men and maidens" in "forest branches and the trodden weed," but that attitude is a "silent form" (41-44).  Or is it a "Silent Form!" and therefore like "Cold Pastoral!" the antecedent of "Thou" (44, 45)?  Hard to tell.  It seems clear from all the variations that "Fair Attitude!" and "Cold Pastoral!" are meant as the antecedents of the lines which follow them, as they share a similar capitalization and punctuation scheme—except when they don't.  And sometimes, they even share it with "Silent Form!"

This distinction matters, as a "fair attitude" is not the same thing as a "silent form."  If the former is the antecedent of "thou" (44), then silent form describes things with fair attitudes; if the latter is, then silent form alone could be enough to "tease us out of thought / as doth eternity" (44, 45).  To put it another way, if a "fair attitude" is responsible for the urn's effects, then anything, ancient, modern or accidental in possession of a "fair attitude" would be enough to trigger this line of thought.  The rest of the poem, then, points to "silent form" as the antecedent, as that would be more consonant with the idea of an enabling ignorance.  As Cleanth Brooks wrote in The Well Wrought Urn:

The "Sylvan historian" will recite its history to other generations. What will it say to them? Presumably, what it says to the poet now: that "formed experience," imaginative insight, embodies the basic and fundamental perception of man and nature. The urn is beautiful, and yet its beauty is based—what else is the poem concerned with?—on an imaginative perception of essentials. Such a vision is beautiful but it is also true. The sylvan historian presents us with beautiful histories, but they are true histories, and it is a good historian.  [...]  The names, dates, and special circumstances, the wealth of data—these the sylvan historian quietly ignores. But we shall never get all the facts anyway-there is no end to the accumulation of facts. Moreover, mere accumulations of facts—a point our own generation is only beginning to realize—are meaningless. The sylvan historian does better than that: it takes a few details and so orders them that we have not only beauty but insight into essential truth.  (162)

Brooks approves of this movement, through ignorance, from the historical to the essential.  I'm not here to sanction particular interpretations, but to discuss how the "Ode" works.  What it says about these matters is less important to me than what it said about them to previous generations of readers.  Not that I don't favor a particular reading: I don't believe the "Ode" an account of what is essential but of how something is made essential.  Says the "Ode":

Strip something of history, lionize ignorance and slap an aphorism on its ass and Bob's your uncle!

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  The typographical problems deviling the final stanza almost preclude a close reading of it.  Or, to put it another way, the transform it into something similar to the urn itself, a Rorshach on which the reader can impose the punctuation and capitalization scheme which best fits his or her prefered interpretation.  Granted, the alternatives are not, as with a Rorshach, a butterfly, two kittens balled up next to the fire place or the look on Aunt Maddy's face when she caught Uncle Moe with his—the alternatives are not so numerous.  But add an exclamation point here and capitalize this letter there and you can rewrite the "Ode" in some image.  I emphasize "some" because I don't want to give the impression that there is an ideal typographic scheme—at least not one we have access to.  So what are we to do with those last, enigmatic lines?

We first need to think about the quotation marks.  As Marjorie Garber discussed in "Quotation Marks," sometimes the entire final two lines are in quotation marks, in which case we likely have the urn uttering them all, since the speaker calls it the "friend to man, to whom thou say'st" (48).  But other versions only have "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" (49) in quotation marks, which leads us to believe that those are the urn's words and "that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know" (49-50) the speaker's gloss.  Now, if the urn with its "silent form" "say'st" this, we have a paradox to contend with.  If the speaker says it for the urn—that is, if he explicates its "silent form" for the benefit of the wider audience of all humanity—then we can proceed.

Never mind, we can't.  The speaker may not be speaking for the urn here but to it.  Here the "Ode" becomes a "brede" of speakers and audiences overwrought, with potential meanings and the trodden convention.  The speaker could be addressing the urn and imputing those words to it, since, if it could speak, it would say something analogous to the meaning the speaker imputes to it.  Such would the speaker would believe.  In this case that the urn says "beauty is truth, truth beauty" and the speaker affirms its words of wisdom, comforting the urn—or the figures trapped upon it.

I could continue, but I want to stop now to allow for some discussion.  As in previous posts, I've pressed the ignorance angle hard here and want to get some feedback before finishing this discussion.  I'm not satisfied with reading per se, but I'm also not unhappy with it.  So feel free to kick the legs from under me ...

Comments

[Adam Roberts]

When I was growing up, my room was in what had been the attic of my parents' house; and a very crunky, corner-filled, zigzag, queer, elongated-here, foreshortened-there, twisty sort of shaped room it was.

Perhaps because of this, I have always found it hard to purge from my head the notion that when Keats writes 'O Attic shape' he doesn't mean so much 'O shape from or reminiscent of Attica in Greece', as 'O you, shaped as you are like an attic' More recently I checked the OED and discovered that this second use of the word 'attic' was well established in Keats's day, and that gives me pause. Because in a sense (and thsi is one of the things your insanely long posts on the poem have been saying, I think) there is something queerly disorted about the notional shape of this notional vase ... that, in a way, the poem is about the topographical strangeness of its artefact.

[Ray Davis]

I think Keats means "shaped for the attic" -- that is, too impractical for everyday use. "What does that boy do up in the attic all day?"

Scott, obviously I think the ignorance angle is there for the pressing. In a close reading, how the reader presses it is up to the reader. As regards Keats, I think you're right to not be unhappy with this experiment, and also right to not be satisfied. It would be a slightly sadder world if this hyperaggressive way of reading the "Ode" was the only one possible, but it's a slightly happier world for it to be documented.

As regards the connection with Silas Weir Mitchell, though, I'm too ignorant to even apostrophize. Wouldn't it be enough to establish this as a critical commonplace that was bound to mislead the bad writers of the time? Among whom some critics placed Keats? (Why Keats would be so attracted to the idea that a genius doesn't need a classical education before spouting off about ancient Greece seems plain enough.)

[N. Pepperell]

So I saw this in the New York Times obituary for Milton Friedman, and of course thought of you:

Mr. Friedman attributed his success to “accidents”: the immigration of his teen-age parents from Czechoslovakia, enabling him to be an American and not a citizen of a Soviet-bloc state; the skill of a high-school geometry teacher who showed him a connection between Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and the Pythagorean theorem, allowing him to see the mathematical beauty; the receipt of a scholarship that enabled him to attend Rutgers and there have Arthur F. Burns and Homer Jones as teachers.

I just wanted to say that I found your reading very useful in many ways :)

[crohns]

TeX does still have some challenges. I’ m not sure that there are any standardized ways to, say, include hyperlinks in your documents, though I’ m fairly sure there are nonstandard packages to do that, and it actually would fit in reasonably well with LaTeX. As the world moves away from editing plain text by hand, it might have to fight somewhat to survive; I can easily imagine, say, an XML DTD that would corresponding quite directly to LaTeX, but it would be a quite delicate juggling act to balance that...