G. Thompson
Questions on first essay? "Explication" in this context means a paper which accounts for the poem's meaning, with attention to relevant details. I tried to enumerate some these in the prompt, and depending on the poem chosen, some might be relatively unimportant. Some versions of explication involve going line by line and inserting some commentary after each line--I would find that very dull going, for you and for me. However, it might be good prewriting for you to try to make notes line by line.
Today--as I mentioned on the announcement after class, I don't feel we can leave "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with the five-minute Cliff's Notes version I ran through last time. If necessary, we will push some of today's discussion back to Oct. 5. We will be shifting to fiction at that point, probably to everyone's relief. Poems, out of all of the literary genres, are probably the most subject to misreading, as it's not unusual for newer readers of poems to lack context which the writer assumes to be present.
For Keats' poem that context includes the following:
Last time I mentioned the Greek-Turkish war, and English / European associations with ancient Greek civilization by way of Plato and others. This valuation was so high that some of the writers of the time went to fight on the side of Greece--Lord Byron died during the war there (of illness and barbaric medical treatment, i.e., bleeding). Greece was highly idealized as the starting-point of philosophy, art, and civilization generally.
This you might have absorbed second hand if you haven't studied it. A Platonic friendship or love affair is one of the mind rather than of the body. This derives from Plato's idea that physical reality is merely the shadow of ideal forms, and connects to the perceived separation of mind and body, or in a more religious context, soul and body. Keats in this poem draws an analogous distinction between art and life: art is eternal and untouchable--not the physical paintings on the urn, which can of course be destroyed, but the Platonic concept of the art, which he sees as eternal.
That's the point of the "unheard melodies" concept in stanza (2?).
This Platonic conception is why I wanted us to look at this poem in the pastoral context. Keats' speaker sees the artistic rendering of scenes on the urn--not just the lovers, who catch everyone's attention, but the crowd and animal going to the sacrifice--are pastoral not only because they are representations of a past civilization which is idealized, but because they exist in the Platonic world of art, separated from the immediate physical sufferings of the speaker (reference to fever and sore throat here). The paradox is that in being so separated from physical sufferings, they also can never achieve fulfillment: the ox is not sacrificed, the lover never attains his bliss. They are not subject to the passage of time described feelingly in Shakespeare's sonnet 73 ("That time of life thou mayst in me behold"), but at least he achieved a time-limited love not available to the figures on the urn.
So the pastoral is an image worth contemplating and wishing for, but one ultimately unattainable--not, in Keats' poem, because shepherds lie and dodging sheep manure isn't all it's cracked up to be, but because as living beings we are ontologically separated from the pristine and bloodless existence of the ideal world of art.
On these themes, a plurality of those posting by 10:30 worked with the carpe diem theme, so we'll delay the discovery / insight theme until Thurs., Oct. 5