18 pages • 36 minutes read
John KeatsA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” consists of five ten-lined stanzas that present, describe, and depict a scene. The ten lines of each stanza are written in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter assigns ten syllables to each line. The first syllable is unaccented; the second is accented; the third is unaccented, and the pattern continues. The most easily recognized lines of iambic pentameter appear in the poem’s first two lines, with the bolded words representing the accented syllables:
“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time” (Lines 1-2).
“Iambic” refers to a pair of syllables, one unaccented and the other accented. “Thou still” (Line 1) is an iamb, as is “slow time” (Line 1). “Bride of” (Line 1) and “foster” (Line 2) are not iambs, because they consist of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one. “Pentameter” refers to lines consisting of five iambs, and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is considered iambic pentameter because each line has five iambs. Despite being a common meter, the iambic pentameter in the poem is hardly noticeable due to Keats’s artful language. An example is the line “Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed!” (Line 21).
By John Keats
Endymion: A Poetic Romance
John Keats
La Belle Dame sans Merci
John Keats
Meg Merrilies
John Keats
Ode on Melancholy
John Keats
Ode to a Nightingale
John Keats
Ode to Psyche
John Keats
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
John Keats
On Seeing the Elgin Marbles
John Keats
The Eve of St. Agnes
John Keats
To Autumn
John Keats
When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be
John Keats