20th WCP: Keats and the Senses of Being: "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Stanza V)

In what ways are philosophy and literature mutually elucidating? More specifically, how can a systematic metaphysics serve as a vehicle of insight into the way that literary art renders, in solution as it were, ontological truths that orchestrate our experience of the ideal? I’d like briefly to address these questions by considering the concluding stanza of John Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in terms of four complementary ontological keys. These four senses of being — the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxological—are the heart of a compelling ontology detailed by William Desmond in his treatise on Being and the Between (1995).

The closing stanza of Keats’s ode, which has beguiled and perplexed readers for nearly 180 years, is among the most exhaustively explicated passages of poetry in the language. And a case can be made that the best, perhaps the only, justification for offering a novel reading of those ten lines at this late date is to demonstrate how they stand to "educate humanity" at the most significantly general level — the level of being. An ontological reading of the sort I have in mind will focus on the Werksein of the poem. In other words, it will approach Keats’s work in conjunction with what Heidegger identifies as the "question of Being." In this connection, I would argue that Desmond’s four-fold ontological classification serves uniquely valuable hermeneutic ends when adopted as an approach to Keats’s ode, especially to the often-misconstrued concluding stanza.

What inspires the present effort is not any univocal desire to "solve" Keats’s ode by proffering some "definitive" explication. Such attempts amount to little more than what the poet himself characterized as an "irritable reaching after fact and reason"— the antithesis of "negative capability." On the contrary, the reflections I offer, like the rapt meditation of the Keatsian persona who encounters the urn, have their source in the philosophically seminal wonder that any genuine engagement with the ode — with participation in its Werksein — excites. I turn now directly to the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and, specifically, to the ontological truths that the concluding stanza depictively affirms when read in the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological keys.

I

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

II

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve:
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

III

Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! More happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
For ever panting, and for ever young —
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

IV

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

V

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 doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

The viewer of the urn is struck, in the concluding stanza, by how a "silent form" captures and preserves in its frieze the dramatic peak of aesthetic, erotic, and devotional mindfulness. An uncanny "foster-child of silence"— an analogue of "eternity" in its ideal remoteness from the corrosive efficacy of time — the urn is a seductively inscrutable presence that both accommodates and transcends the reasoning that is attuned to the univocal sense of being. Such reasoning construes the world in accord with Pascal’s esprit geometrique, in light of which mathematical precision is the measure of ultimate truth and reality. The univocal sense of being — for which ambiguity or paradox is problematic — sponsors a type of rationality that takes as axiomatic the notion that intelligibility is a function of modes of thought that are linear, formally logical, or in Keats’s terminology "consequitive."

Resistant to the requisites of discursive intelligibility, however, the urn "teases" the viewer "out of thought," though it does not thereby completely elude univocal determination. For it is unambiguously, determinately a "Cold Pastoral": the sculpted pastoral figures and scenes are, like the urn’s numinous silence, remote from the "breathing," the heat, the "panting" of ephemeral earthly life.

While from a univocal standpoint the urn exists "objectively" at an inert remove from the time-bound, flesh-and-blood existence whose trace remains figured about its outer surface, the viewer does not turn away from it, in the end, toward life. Nor does his metonymic appellation, "Cold Pastoral!" signify an ironic attitude, as some readers believe. Rather, the speaker perceives the urn as a source of perpetual solace and assurance of ideal value in a world of time and change. An archetypal emblem of the work of art, the vase is a figurative repository of otherwise fleeting moments of idyllic happiness. Univocally apprehended, it speaks to each generation in unambiguously ideal terms. A transtemporal "thing of beauty" it betokens and invites our "participatory enactment" (Stambovsky 1988) of a transcendent vision, a vision in which beauty is truth and vice versa. Several of the prominent critics who have read this epigram and its context univocally have concluded that it’s simply an intellectual lapse, a flaw, in an otherwise remarkable poem; others have striven to explain it in light of definitive concepts of truth and of beauty. Perhaps the bottom line from the univocal perspective is that the urn’s message equating beauty and truth, a message that univocally minded readers explain determinately in one way or another, is given as the single thing that we mortals need to know about what an ideal aesthetic object communicates in the language of the human spirit.

If from the univocal orientation we move to one keyed to the equivocal sense of being, we read the ode’s concluding stanza with an eye toward what is, in Desmond’s words, indeterminate beyond univocal determinacy." This translates into semantic and conceptual indeterminacies that attune us to the urn’s strangeness, its otherness. In this frame of reference the urn, "Cold" yet "pastoral," is irresolvably paradoxical. It beguiles us out of univocal modes of thought such that the unambiguously ideal character of the message that the sculpted figures convey to succeeding generations of viewers is salvifically accessible only by way of visionary "erotic self-transcendence" (Desmond’s phrase, in which he intends "eros" to be understood Platonically, as a general urge, inspired by an experience of deficiency or lack, toward ideal fulfillment or wholeness). If we approach it in this way as a regulative ideal, the beauty/truth equation — like the urn, and any genuine work of art — resists the "fixed univocalization" of a single application or meaning.

More generally, the urn, an overdetermined "Attic shape," speaks to the equivocal sense of being in both negative and affirmative respects. Negatively, the time-bound speaker encounters the timeless artifact in way that progressively realizes the latter’s alien character, its "otherness." The reflective engagement thus culminates in the exclamation "Cold pastoral!", which suggests the urn’s radical alterity vis-à-vis the "heat" of the human activity and passions that the marble legend depicts. Affirmatively, on the other hand, the progressive "othering" that occurs through the ode amounts to a pluralizing of being that contributes to a "community of irreducible," because equivocally cast, others. We see this most saliently in the ode’s closing lines, which give voice in an aesthetic register to the community of art and life. Established in the viewer’s encounter with the urn in its irreducible totality, this community — by extension, possible for us to the degree that we find ourselves visionary participants in the Werksein of the poem — is something concentrated in the voice with which the urn speaks through the beholder. The message, though, is among the most notoriously plurivocal of any oracular dictum that occurs

in major English poetry. Indeed the beauty/truth equation is often explained as an instance of "nonmediation"— incommunicable mystery — merely "posing as" an expression of genuine "intermediation" between the urn and the viewer. In other words, the urn is read as speaking in a radically autonomous voice. But this is to miss the urn’s progressive "othering" through the ode (from an equivocal orientation, the "negative" aspect of the poem). This "othering," however, is a process of definition that calls attention to the viewer’s own consciousness as the theater — the intermediating moment — of the artifact’s communicative efficacy, "other" though it be in its ideal remoteness from the living experience of time and change.

The irresolvable indeterminacy that attaches to how, finally and in specific detail, we are to interpret the hyperuranian revelation attributed to the urn is something that gets mooted when we read the ode in the dialectical key. In Desmond’s words, dialectic

is concerned with the articulation in intelligible saying of that interplay [among self and other], with respect to both mind and being. Moreover, it is intimately linked with the sameness of univocity and the difference of equivocity, and most especially with the oscillation between them. (134)

Self-mediation is the defining moment of dialectical determination, something in light of which we can read the ode’s fifth stanza (and with it the urn’s utterance) as not, in the last analysis, equivocal. In fact, it is entirely delimitable as an evolving episode of the viewer’s meditative observation and reflection.

The dialectical sense directs attention to two cardinal interrelated facets of the ode that fully emerge in the last stanza. The first is that at bottom the poem is as much about its own reflective medium — the persona’s engaged awareness — as it is about the urn itself. The second feature disclosed by a dialectically keyed reading is that the ode unfolds largely by virtue of the resolution of indeterminacies. These indeterminacies evidence the equivocal status of our pathetic temporality — the self-consuming character of our most cherished aesthetic, passional and devotional experience — in the presence of an atemporal, ideal incarnation of that experience. Dialectically conceived, the ode fulfills the promise of an encounter between two antipodal poles of truth: the earthly and the ideal.

If this encounter appears paradoxical from a univocal viewpoint, that paradox is resolved when we privilege the equivocal sense of being and, consequently, the temporal and the eternal seem to negate each other: ideal love, for instance, vanishes in time, while the urgency that attaches to the ineluctably fugitive character of temporally realized values is neutralized in the timeless calm of the ideal. When we apprehend them in the dialectical key, the mortal viewer and the ideal urn — and by extension, the time-bound reader and the timeless poem — mutually and transformatively define each other through a process of mediation. This occurs as an episode, as an adventure, of the viewer’s conscious life as he scrutinizes and reacts to the urn. As such, the encounter is a self-mediating drama that gets played out entirely in the beholder’s consciousness. It is the adventure of how the urn as artwork — the ideal as a presence — communicates sustaining value to the pathetically transient world of human experience. In the climactic synthesis when the Keatsian persona utters the vessel’s visionary message, he remains at once dialectically other to the urn while he self-transcendently speaks as the urn. On this reading, the indeterminacy that we associate with the beauty/truth equation, expressed both for and by the urn, gets recast as "the doubling of the voice of being" (Desmond’s phrase). This doubling is manifest in the registers, the timeless and the temporal, in which the ideal speaks to us — on the one hand, in the "silent voice" of the urn and, on the other, in that of the poet speaking audibly as the urn.

I turn, lastly, to a metaxological frame of reference, one that complements readings of the ode that derive from the univocal, equivocal, and dialectical senses of being. A metaxological approach to the concluding stanza is open, in Desmond’s words, "to plurality, but knows also the interstices of being that resists any easy assertion of continuity and facile reconciliation." In Keats’s ode, the elements of being that resist facile reconciliation are, on the one hand, the pathos of human temporality (Unamuno’s "tragic sense of life") and, on the other, the visionary transformation of that pathos — of that pathos as ideally rendered — in the timeless work of art. The metaxological orientation thus leads us to rethink "the mediated wholeness of the dialectical." From this perspective, "Mediation is an intermediation where there is an infinitely open doubling of being, redoubling beyond self-closure, both inwardly and outwardly" (Desmond 200-01).

To rethink the unity of the ode in this way is to incorporate within a more open sense of being the determinacies that characterize univocal thinking as well as the ambiguity and heterogeneity to which the equivocal sense adjusts our focus. And this leads us to be more particularly "mindful of the recalcitrances and breakdowns and tensions of opposition" which we invariably face in any living encounter with the ideal. Moreover, the metaxological sense of being will not let us rest content with the culminating synthesis postulated by a dialectical account of the ode’s closing lines. If we construe them from the metaxu (i.e., ontologically from the "between"), these lines bring dramatically to life not a totalizing self-mediation of the viewer’s consciousness but rather an intermediation between the viewer as self and the urn as other. And they do so in a way that famously resists discursive modes of disposing of the Keatsian persona’s perplexity as he puzzles over the sculpted legend’s provenance and exact meaning. To discern this is to appreciate how the ode’s epigrammatic close, like the marble figures that ornament the urn, sets in relief what Desmond would call the double presencing of agapeic mind — mind called to self-transcendence — a double presencing that is operative throughout the poem. The viewer’s agapeic mindfulness in contemplating the urn is an order consciousness that, unlike the totalizing self-mediation of dialectical thought, is as much open to, and an index of, an exogenous reality as it is a thing in itself. It is, moreover, the medium that testifies to the "communicative being," a "coming into the between," whereby the urn and the speaker intermediate each other. In other words, the beauty/truth declaration dramatizes how, in Desmond’s idiom, the Keatsian persona let "the promise of" ideal "plenitude" in the urn as other—what we might term the urn’s salvific vision of the whole — "come to manifestation in the Between and out of [the viewer’s] own resources" (408). The viewer’s perplexity through the course of the ode changes to fascination and wonder bordering on astonishment as he encounters what the urn’s figures make accessible through participatory enactment of the artwork’s Werksein: namely, the consolation that time-beleaguered mortal existence finds in the ideal. This is the core of Keats’s profound drama of the artist’s agapeic mind come to life in the "communicative being" of the artwork — the ode’s as well as the urn’s.

From this standpoint, the urn and the viewer — just as the ode and the reader — go "toward the other," each delivering "itself over to the other." The speaker, delivered to the urn, becomes its voice. The urn, after resisting the viewer’s queries, speaks as other through the latter. Encountered in this way, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" demonstrates how both the numinous work of art — any genuine work of art — and the conscious life of the beholder become "available for the other," as Desmond would put it; and in so doing, it discloses how each thereby affirms its being, its reality, by virtue of "its communication of itself to the other."

As the voice of "posthumous agapeic mind" (Desmond), the declaration that beauty is truth, truth beauty communicates a "love of being in its intrinsic good" (558). In one respect this equation simply assumes and generalizes Coleridge’s dictum about the willing suspension of disbelief, an attitude that underwrites our enjoyment of fictive drama from a visionary stance. This attitude places us at a remove from the paralyzing, the disgusting or the otherwise morally and cognitively benumbing shocks that all too often accompany our perceptions of beauty and truth, shocks that deaden us to any intermediation of the two. Only in the "silence" of that visionary remove from the "burning" and the "parching" of "breathing human passion" are we capable of being ideally alive to the "astonishing gift of being." The urn — indeed, Keats’s ode — thus speaks to us agapeically, in a "silent" voice that calls to us from a realm that transcends "our differentiation of the good and evil" (Desmond 538).

The oracular statement at the close of the poem "gives a voice to the silent" vessel, as to an "elemental thing" (Desmond) a thing that in its enigmatic character "asks" the beholder’s "gift" of voice, a thing that climactically offers itself "in a pact of speaking" (460). But as the urn speaks, even in the viewer’s intermediated voice, the latter himself exists poised — as may we in relation to our lifeworld as transformed by the Werksein of Keats’s ode — in a more profound silence, one described by Martin Buber as a silence toward the Du, the silence of all tongues, the taciturn waiting in the unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic word [that] leaves the Du free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. (I and Thou 89).