Ode on a Grecian Urn
A speaker questions a marble vessel whose figures never move: a piper whose melody is never heard, a lover a breath away from a kiss he will never take, a green altar toward which a garlanded heifer is led out of a town emptied forever. Heard melodies are sweet, he decides, but those unheard are sweeter, and boughs that cannot shed their leaves keep a spring that mortal love, panting and cloyed, cannot. Printed in the Annals of the Fine Arts in 1820, its closing exchange between the urn and the man addressing it has been argued over more than any other two lines in English Romanticism.
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