John Keats, the Romantic English poet, is one of the most enduring poets of all time. It’s amazing that he’s achieved this kind of reputation since he died at the age of 25, spending only six years really writing poetry and only publishing for four years.

During his short lifetime, Keats didn’t see much success. Scholars estimate that he only saw 200 copies of his work published in his lifetimes. Although he received many bad reviews before his death—some say that he died from bad reviews of his poetry—he had many venerable allies in his lifetime including Percy Bysshe Shelley. During his lifetime and into today, his Odes—with their intensity of feeling and language—are considered his greatest poetical accomplishments.

Like his own life, Keats seemed to recognize that the most intensely beautiful things on this earth are the things that last for the shortest amounts of time. Perhaps his most famous line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty-that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” is an incomplete picture of his idea of Beauty. Keats refers to Beauty again in “Ode to a Nightingale,” and in “Ode to Melancholy.” Taken in context with these other ideas of Beauty, Keats seems to say Beauty, and therefore truth, is fleeting, but a fit of Melancholy and the Urn can be reminders of the transitory natures of these things.

In “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats says “Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes” in referring to all things which are lost through time. This statement says Beauty is fleeting.  In “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” Keats says “yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade.” This statement seems to say the woman on the Urn will thankfully be beautiful forever. 

Taken with Keats’ other statements, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Beauty is truth in “Ode to a Grecian Urn” and fading in “Ode to a Nightingale. With these statements, Keats seems to say an idea or a vision starts to fade after it is realized so the eventual product created will only be a shadow of the original truth. Therefore, the images on the Urn can remind people of beauty and truth, but they in themselves are not beautiful. They are the product of the artist’s fading moment of beauty and truth which he tried to portray in painting the urn. Therefore, even though the painting of the woman on the urn is unfading, it is only the real-life woman who is now dead who was ever beautiful.

Keats seems say both the Urn as well as Melancholy are reminders about the transitory of natures of truth and Beauty. In “Ode to Melancholy,” Keats says “She [Melancholy] dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die.” This line says Melancholy is with Beauty, even while Beauty is in full bloom, because with the bloom of Beauty comes a sad knowledge that it will one day fade. A “fit” of Melancholy is a reminder to appreciate truth and Beauty in all their wonder, but also to remember these states are only temporary. Keats appreciated and encouraged Melancholy because, the footnote says, it is “a sensibility that accepts, even relishes, evanescence.”