-----Original Message-----
From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
>It appears indisputable to me that for the purpose of the poem it is the urn
speaking; I can't see how else grammatically it would make sense ("Thou,
silent form, dost tease us out of thought...Thou shalt remain...a friend to
man, to whom thou say'st" &c). And it also seems to me, though this is of
course arguable, what Keats "hears" from the urn is the flower of his own
>thought about it.
I think so too, that grammatically it must be the urn speaking,
and another 'evidence' for that is the change of pronoun from
"Thou" to "ye" which suggests a different 'you' being addressed,
first the "thou" of the urn, then the urn addressing the "ye"
of the poet.
>What the lines mean is another question. To my mind, Keats clearly and
quite consciously isn't referring to fact or information (I would suggest he
is consciously appealing against it, being "teased out of thought" in the
"midst of ...woe"), nor appealing to an instrumental idea of "truth". In
which case the "truth" Keats means is not what might be mundanely regarded
as being true or factual, nor the "beauty" merely what is pleasing. The
poem itself is after all a suspended promise, an "unravished bride", art's
>happiness.
Well, here, I agree, that Keats "isn't referring to fact or information"
and think too that he is "consciously appealing against" fact or
information, the mundane definition of what is true or not. The "truth" for
all it has been attached to instrumentality or the factual has always
been as much connected with the idea of belief, or a truth that is
not readily apparent in the facts, which the facts may not account for,
just as beauty may not be accounted for by the particulars of what
is pleasing or felt to be beautiful. In "consciously
appealing against" fact or information, he favors truth and beauty which
are one, unlike the instrumentality which divides them into particulars
of characteristics and response but also has opposed them to one another.
That "suspended promise" is all the poet of this poem believes in, poetry's
beauty, poetry's truth, which is all that one "may know," but I have to say
too, that I don't think, it's merely "art's happiness," the speaker of this
poem seems to live hovering on the edge of that nothing,
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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