Ode on a Grecian Urn Transience

Time moves slowly on the urn. Its lifespan is much longer than ours, and so changes happen to it much more gradually. But "slow" is only a relative term. In the history of the universe, for example, the time between Ancient Greece and modern times is a mere blink of the eye.

The speaker keeps playing the same card again and again: pretending that the people on the urn live in the same moment forever. There is no transience in this world. For the lover, it’s a trade-off. He never gets to make out with his lady, but he always wants to make out with her. You may have heard the famous Tennyson quote, "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." This poet adds a twist. He’s like, "The best thing would be to always be in love but never to ‘have loved.’" This, obviously, is a contradiction and a fantasy, but that doesn’t lessen the power of the idea.

Line 26 sounds more like a steaming steak dinner than a person, but you get the idea: the lovers are always on the verge of satisfaction but never achieve it because things don’t change in the world of the urn. Where there is transience, there is the possibility of getting sick of the things you love: instead of a tender desire, love becomes a frustrating "thirst" that keeps coming back.

It’s weird to image a town that will never have people in it. Without people, wouldn’t it just be a bunch of buildings? The word "desolate" has a slightly negative connotation, as if we were supposed to identify with the spurned and abandoned town. Also, the word "silent" reminds us of the urn, the adopted child of silence. But unlike the town, the urn gets to interact with humans because it exists in a transient world. Without transience, things that are abandoned cannot be found again.

The poem speeds up at the end, reminding the reader of his or her own transience, and of the mortality of the speaker, by now long dead. This poem, like the urn, has continued to speak to new generations and address new problems. How are our "woes" different form those of Keats’s audience?