As the title shows, the poem is a meditation upon an art object. Keats examines the question of the capacities and limits of an aesthetic medium, namely, the urn, taken as symbolic of the kind of truth proposed by art, but one whose order of knowing its implicitly criticised by the speaker as a limited one which denies humanity. Although intense, the figures on the urn can never consummate their desire, for they belong to a world of coldness and fixity.
Beginning in the first stanza by invoking not only the permanent quality of a great work of art, but also its stillness and serenity, Keats, in a Socratic style, goes on to question its essential meaning whose answer is given in the next two stanzas.- they satisfy us ina way in which life cannot. They are permanent while life changes and passes. Even in their incomplete moments, they are more satisfactory than life itself; this lover loves, not a 'beatuy that must die', but that which, from the nature of art 'cannot fade'; although he may never capture his mistress, for they are both parts of a motionless pattern, he should take comfort from the fact that they will be forever in the state of 'inmortal youth'.
But what is indeed the meaning of this perpetual youth? That it is perpetually anti-youth and anti-life, in fact dead. This brings us a paradox, that of the intensest life achieved in death, they remain motionless, This pessimism is the erotic equivalent of the identification of death and sexual love that was so typical of 19thC. Romanticism. To die in love would be to be born to love. The lovers dying as individual identities, being transformed into a common identity. In the las two lines, the state of immediacy is conveyed not only by a simply translation into terms of the erotic, but rather by a quality of suspension in the erotic imagery, the state just prior of sulfilment -not an arrested ecstasy, but rather on pre.
