The Arts

A Reason To Smile

Sometimes the obvious is staring you in the face, and you just need someone to point it out. Such is the case with our A Reason To Smile feature. 

Alessandra Bosco, an essential part of the Steady team, who helps make sure our sentences are clear and precise, our verbs don’t split their infinitives, and our commas are in the right place, pointed out that the acronym for A Reason To Smile is — drumroll please, although you can obviously figure it out — A.R.T.S. What a happy surprise, and a reason to smile indeed. 

The arts are magical expressions of humanity. They are found in every culture and every era of our species’ existence. And they come in almost infinite forms. Art challenges, soothes, uplifts, and plucks at our deepest emotions. It can make us laugh, cry, cheer, sing along, stand in awe, and yes, smile. 

We felt there was no better way to celebrate art in today’s A Reason To Smile than to feature art about art. We often showcase music, but today we turn to poetry inspired by pottery. It is one of the most famous, studied, and debated poems in the English language: John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” It doesn’t seem that Keats was inspired by any one urn in particular but rather by a series of writings on ancient Greek art that were popular in the early 19th century. 

Nevertheless, we are sharing a picture of an urn to illustrate the artistry of the age and how its images resonate with Keats’s words.

When it comes to Greek art, we do know that Keats was also inspired by the set of sculptures from the Acropolis of Athens known as the Elgin Marbles. He wrote a poem called “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” in fact. Keats encountered the artwork upon its arrival in London after it was removed from its original home by agents of Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin. During the subsequent 200 years, there has been much debate about whether this artwork should remain in Britain or be returned to Greece. Who has rights of ownership has long been a question surrounding art, and it probably will continue to be as the legacy of colonialism is reconsidered.

It should also be noted that for as long as there has been art, there likely have been art critics. Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is now widely celebrated as one of the great works of Romantic poetry, but it was initially panned. And its famous last lines about beauty and truth are hotly debated for whether they are — as the poet T.S. Eliot would later write — “a serious blemish on a beautiful poem.”

Beauty, like art, is in the eye of the beholder. 

In the poem, we can see how art conveys a sense of immortality. The artists of ancient Greece, like those of China, Australia’s First Nations, ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, and countless other societies of the past, continue to inspire us after centuries, and even millennia. Keats, who died at the age of 25, also lives on in his words (and in high school English classes). 

“Ode on a Grecian Urn” shows how art can freeze a moment in time for eternity. It can summon forth a broad spectrum of human emotions, and it can, in its most exquisite incarnations, capture the beauty and truth of life.  

We hope you enjoy our selection and A Reason To Smile (the ARTS) more generally.

Ode on a Grecian Urn 
BY JOHN KEATS

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
       A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
       Of deities or mortals, or of both,
               In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
       What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
               What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
         Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
         For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
         For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
                For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
         That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
                A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
         To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
         And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
         Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
                Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
         Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
                Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
         Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
         Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
         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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