Shelly and Keats - The Passing of Time

Truth and Beauty of Passing Time Neglect, death, and immortality are powerful themes of not only Romantic poets, but poets throughout every age of history. Countless works of poetry dwell on the seemingly inconsequential passing of life, while still more endeavor to discover something so significant that it can entrench itself into the folds of history as truly immortal. Two Romantic poems that engage wonderfully with these themes are Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Although they take opposite approaches--Shelley uses “Ozymandias” to express the mutability of life, while Keats uses the Urn to show that art can be timeless--both poems revolve around an object struggling against the passing of time. Both “Ozymandias” and “Ode on a Grecian urn” exemplify the struggle with the passing of time, and although the two poems appear to have opposite approaches to the subject, each can be read with a second interpretation that shows the two are actually extremely similar. “Ode on a Grecian Urn” beautiful captures the frozen state of the characters painted on the urn. The speaker is entirely enamored by the beauty of the scene. He speaks to each scene as he moves from subject to subject, becoming ever increasingly overwhelmed by the serenity of the Urn, “What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape / of deities or mortals, or of both, … What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?” (Keats Lines 5-9). He focuses in on a single motionless piper, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on” (Keats 11-12), and then moves to a youth who is nearly about to kiss his love, “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade” (Keats 18-19). In both pictures the speaker dwells on the apparent immortality of the piper and girl, telling the youth “not to grieve” because his lover will never age. This line, and in fact the entire