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: It's basically about him thinking way too much about an urn. Here's a quick run down of each stanza: : 1- He's musing about the urn. Asking what legend they depict, and what's going on. Why are men chasing woman etc? Says the urn is a historian as it tells a story. It can tell a more beautiful story than possibly his poems can. : 2- Looks at other pictures of pipers, and lovers under trees. He says unheard melodies of the piper are sweeter than mortal melodies as they're not affected by time. POints out the youth'll never kiss the lover, but he shouldn't grieve as her beauty'll never fade. : 3- Says the trees on the pot will never shed their leaves. Talks about mortal love eventually always being lost to 'breathing human pion' etc. Basically mortal love is lost to and then gone. Discussing how nothing on the urn will ever change from perfection. : 4- Examines a group of villagers leading a heifer (cow) to be sacrificed on the urn. Wonders where they're going 'To what green alter...'. The little town depicted will always be empty because the people will always be leading the cow. It'll be empty forever. : 5- Adresses the issue of how the urn will remain even after he is gone. He realises his own mortality and accepts it. : The whole poem is a look at eternal perfection. He sees this in the urn. It also looks at the moment between pleasure and pain, life an death. A theme returned to by many romantic poets. The lover and his lady are caught between the anxiety of the kiss and the pleasure of it. The trees between their height of perfection, and their demise in autumn. : Keat's seems to envy the images and their immortality. They will remain 'forever young'. He won't. After he's gone it'll still remain. This is the same theme as 'Ode to a Nightingale'. He realises at the end true immortality doesn't exist 'when old age shall this generation waste' - that being both his generation and that of the reader. He is struck by how a 'silent form' captures and preserves in its frieze such a dramatic peak of aesthetic mindfulness. His jealousy shows with the 'cold pastoral!'It's away from heat and breath, and anything else of the real world yet it is immortal, and eternally beautiful, and he isn't. The urn itself is a symbol of death so he knows deep down immortality is impossible. : It articualtes the common belief that beauty is the path to truth. The quote 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' is a big question that everyone debates its meaning. Personally I think that it's a paradox becasue beauty is an opinion where as truth is fact... so they can never be one and the same. So it says 'its all ye need to know on earth' but we never will... perhaps we'll have to wait until death to see true beauty - heaven, as then we'll know it's fact whereas now we just have to believe in heaven. Who knows... work out your own opinion on that one. : And finally - it relates to other poems in the following way: : Ode To a Nightingale - engagement with fluid expressiveness of music. : I hope that was some help to you.

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