Hi cris
it's an old perplexity as to who says the final lines. My own preference,
purely on aesthetic grounds, is that is the Urn speaking, metaphorically of
course. If it's Keats then it becomes a questionable piece of art-centred
preaching, everything that is true is most certainly not beautiful, but if
it's the Urn then it's just the kind of thing it might, as it were, say.
Experientially, a line of D.J.Enright's: 'One Bach outweighs ten Belsens',
would be taken as darkly ironic, by say a Keats on his deathbed given
prevision of the future, whereas the Urn would take it as 'straight'.
Anyhow, that's my Urn vote!
Best
Dave
David Bircumshaw
Spectare's Web, A Chide's Alphabet
& Painting Without Numbers
http://www.chidesalphabet.org.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "cris cheek" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2004 11:16 AM
Subject: Ode on a Grecian Urn
Hi,
in the course of heated list-related b/c exchanges the question has
arisen as to who "says" the final lines?
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'
There is a footnote in the everyman edition. 'In a letter to Bailey
dated 22nd November 1817 Keats wrote: "I am certain of nothing but the
holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of Imagination. What
the imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth--whether it existed
before or not--for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love;
they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.'
There is some dispute as their punctuation also. The version I enter
above is as I have found it.
love and love
cris
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