Theme of Ideal and Real and Transience and Permanence Reveal in Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn:

The odes of Keats primarily deal with some of the conflicts that account for the complexity depth of meaning. The fundamental conflict was on the choice between the real world and the ideal world which he created by his imagination. The other points of conflicts are art and life, pleasure and pain, happiness and melancholy and the transient and the permanent.

In Ode on a Grecian Urn the conflicts revolve around the temporal and the permanent. The Urn is a piece of art and, it is immortal. Around the rim of the urn there are engraved the pictures of the youth and maidens, lover and beloved, piper, trees etc. The youth, carved on the urn will never decay. The piper on the Urn will always continue to pipe songs. The trees on the ways love his beloved, and the beloved on her part shall ever be fair. The poet says:

"She cannot fade

For ever will thou love and she be fair!"

Like other romantic poets Keats lives in the world of beauty and ideal. But his ideal world is not successful. The lover on the urn is always trying to kiss his beloved, but he is unable to kiss his beloved because he is only a picture on the urn. Keats contrasts the world of art with that of reality in which everything is temporary and decadent. In real life human passion-

"leaves a heart high sorrowful and clay'd

A burning forhead, and a parching tongue."

Keats describes a paradox between art and life in the following lines:

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:"

Here is a contrast between the ideal life in which the music of beauty travels directly to the heart and the music of real life which is heard once and lost forever. In this sense the world of art can be superior to the world of reality. But man must come back to the world of reality after a brief stay in the world of imagination. The Urn will always continue to give the message:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

These lines show that Keats must not escape to the world of Urn or Nightingale for long. At the end of the poem, the poet realizes that though the Urn is immortal, it is speechless and it will remain speechless. It will remain empty and desolate and the desolation of the Urn (like the word forlorn in Ode to a Nightingale) once again brings him back to the world of reality.