An interesting and insightful anonymous submission, one that will leave you mesmerised by the complexity of the paradoxes of life.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
These beautiful and eternal lines are from one of the five great Odes of John Keats – ‘Ode on the Grecian Urn’. Critics are divided between Keats as only a sensual versus spiritual poet or a mixture of both. In these lines, Keats is merely stating the basic facts of life; life is a paradox – art speaks truth through its beauty – all truth is forever frozen in any sublime art form. By looking at the Grecian urn, we are not only fulfilling our visual sense of the aesthetic, but also paradoxically preserving truth in time. The story of the urn – the two lovers who are about to embrace but haven’t as yet or the religious animal sacrifice that is about to take place but doesn’t on the exquisite urn, will go on to their natural conclusions in real life. Likewise, this flower will bloom through eternity in this picture but will fade and die in real life.
For me, this picture personifies the continuity and permanence of life, and also its brevity.
DEAD POETS 