about the poem 'ode on a grecian urn' by john keats

The poem "ode on the grecian urn" is by John Keats.

In the poem he describes a grecian the pictures on a grecian urn, the urn expresses the flowery tale even more sweetly than the poet can express by poetry.

Keats refers to the urn as the 'unravished bride of quietness' and 'foster child of silence and slow time'. He says that the urn is a "sylvan historian" telling us a story. The poet wants to know more about the stories that the pictures on the urn tell. He asks that what is the picture framed by leaves is shown on the urn, he wonders whether the picture are of people or gods or of both.He is curious to about the reluctance of the maidens struggling to escape and what is it that the men want. He wants to know what are the instruments shown and what kind of melody they play.

Keats says that the melodies that are heard are sweet but the ones unheard like those on the urn are sweeter as they make you wonder and make it more appealing to the ears and he tells the boy playing the pipes on the picture to keep playing forever.His song can never end nor the trees ever shed their leaves. The lover on the urn can never win a kiss from his beloved, but his beloved can never lose her beauty. Happy are the trees on the urn, for they can never lose their leaves. Happy is the musician forever playing songs forever new. The lovers on the urn enjoy a love forever warm, forever panting, and forever young, far better than actual love, which eventually brings frustration and dissatisfaction.

Keats sees the next picture and wonders to which god are the people sacrificing the heifer held by a priest. Instead of focusing on the sacrificial procession as another scene on his urn, Keats goes on to mention the town emptied of its inhabitants by the procession. The town is desolate and will forever be silent. 

In the final stanza Keats says that the urn teases him out of thought, as does eternity; that is, the problem of the effect of a work of art on time and life. He says that the urn has been able to preserve a temporary and happy condition in permanence, but it cannot do the same for Keats or his generation; old age will waste them and bring them woe. Yet the pictured urn can do something for them and for succeeding generations as long as it will last. It will bring them through its pictured beauty a vision of happiness of a kind available in eternity, just as it has brought Keats a vision of happiness by means of sharing its existence and bringing its scenes to emotional life through his imagination. All you know on earth and all you need to know in regard to beautiful works of art, whether urns or poems about urns, is that they give an inkling of the unchanging happiness.  According to keats the urn says that Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.

thats all i could write on it hope its good