The Odes Ode on a Grecian Urn: Plot Summery: The poet examines a Greek funeral vase and the images embossed on it. à The Ode is like a trail of thought provoked by the motifs embossed on the Urn. The images arouse the poet to contemplate the irony of life and art. The latter offers eternity (“She cannot fade”) while the former cannot separate the shadow of death from itself (“When old age shall this generation …showed first 75 words of 1780 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1780 total…the fulfilment of what the poet is searching for in the Ode is Romantic- it is in nature that he finds the perfect fusion of eternity and death. Unlike art or the Nightingales song, autumn is animate and part of a cycle, which inevitably means, metaphorically, that it is not beyond death. Yet this very nature of it being part of a cycle gives it its own unique eternity something the poet recognises and admires.