John Keats jubilantly praises the solitary, steady nature of the Grecian Urn in his ode, “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Traced throughout Keats’s poetry, is the idea that the ever-present and unchanging objects in life carry immense beauty and character, but that they lack the vitality and brevity of life.

Keats constantly probes and questions the story of this urn. Illustrated with pictures of flighty maidens and evergreen boughs, it holds a tale frozen in time, a silent saga. Instead of insulting this statuesque nature of this story, Keats praises the beauty of imagination, of dreams, or fables. He revels in the untold, in melodies unheard. When Keats says, “not a soul to tell why thou art desolate, can e’er return,” he draws a parallel to Aeschylus’s watchman, who refers to the silent nature of the House of Atreus. They both draw on an inanimate object’s story. Expanding this belief to all of life, imagine the untold stories that lie in classrooms, in shy students, in the disgusting. Everything that resides on this earth, holds a story, a history. Keats desires truth, for the untold to come to the light.

His final statement affirms this belief; “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” Truth may lie in a sunset or nature or a beautiful woman, but it also lies in the mundane, in the stories untold.