The sententious statement attributed to the urn at the close of the poem is similar to a remark made by Keats in his Letters: 'What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth', and the idea of the interdependence of Beauty, Truth and Imagination is something that figures repeatedly in Keats. In 'Grecian Urn', Keats arrives at the statement through the series of paradoxes of eternity and transience that he develops throughout the poem. Yet, far from being an unequivocal conclusion that resolves all the paradoxes, the closing statement creates whole new questions.
We cannot be certain, for example, on who is saying what to whom. The speech marks that enclose the Urn's statement have been placed variously by different editors. To see the alternatives, you need to look closely at the last three lines. In some versions, the inverted commas enclose just 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'. So the possibilities are:
1 - The Urn 'speaks' the statement about Beauty and Truth; and 'that is all..' is spoken by Keats to the reader;
2 - The last two lines complete are spoken by the Urn to humankind;
3 - The last three lines complete are spoken by Keats to the Urn.
It's dizzying, but wonderful, and it makes a real difference to the way we respond to the poem, and the idea of Beauty embodied in the Urn. In the end, it seems that the Urn is beautiful, but reminds us simultaneously that true Beauty is not frozen and eternal, but subject to Time and Change.
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