‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ portrays a contradiction between the transience of life and the permanence of art. The projection of this contradiction explicitly starts in the second stanza where Keats says “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”. Keats obviously refers to the heard melodies of the nightingale which he has celebrated in his previous ode ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The pictures portrayed on the surface of the urn are permanent and they altogether create a melody which the poet cannot hear – it is not felt through “the sensual ear, but, more endear’d”. Heard melodies can be affected by the “weariness, the fever, and the fret” of everyday life, but unheard melodies cannot. The “happy boughs” too cannot shed their leaves as spring is permanent in this artistic locale. The melodies of the “piping songs” too will remain “for ever new”.
In the final stanza Keats intensifies how this work of art will remain unchanged in perpetuity. Here again he offers a contradiction between the mutability of human life (symbolised by “old age”) and the permanence of this “Attic shape”. Human life will not receive the bliss of eternity, but art will:
"When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'"
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