Ode on a Grecian Urn

Personally, I thought reading this poem by John Keats was very hard to follow. I read it once and was like umm what is going on here. I thought it was word, which made it that more confusing and hard to follow. The only thing that helped me understand it was that I knew something about Grecian urn's so after re-reading it the message was more clear.

In the first couple stanzas of the poem, the speaker is depicting scenes of musicians and lovers in a beautiful setting. He uses imagary of flowers, happiness, love, and ecstasy to portray this beautiful scence. To the speaker, these characters represent timeless perfection that only art can capture. The lovers will always love and the musicians will always play under trees that never loose their leaves as seen in this line, "beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare." The poem starts off happy, but then takes a turn as most poems do. The speaker admires the urn, but knows that the urn is not life. You cannot be happy forever. The ending of the poem about truth and beauty is a bit of a riddle. Beauty, in life, is not necessarily truth and the urn symbolizes that such timeless beauty is only in art.