“Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats and its reflections in Russian poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries
Authors:   Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno, Avtukhovich Tatiana Je. 
Published: December 2024

The article raises the question of the mythological substratum of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats. It shows that the motivic structure of Keats’s work is determined by the archetypal semantics of the vase image and hidden reminiscences referring to the complex of myths about Apollo. According to the dictionaries of symbols, the vase symbolizes the Great Mother, the feminine perceiving principle, the unity of the universe. The archetypal semantics of the keyword in the title makes Keats’s poem a zone of symbolic generalization and motivates his appeal to myth as a way to overcome the boundary between life and art based on the interaction of different artistic languages – visual and verbal, fused together in mythological images. The opposition of life and art testifies to Keats’s reflection both on metaphysical problems and on his own aesthetics.Two scenes described on the urn by Keats correspond to its semantics: a young lover is forever chasing his beloved without reaching her; a procession led by a priest is taking a sacrificial calf to the altar to perform the sacrifice. The hypothesis is proposed that the first scene “depicted” by Keats on an imaginary Greek urn dates back to the ancient myth of Apollo and Daphne, according to which the nymph Daphne, fleeing from the persecution of the god Apollo in love with her, turned into a laurel tree. The second scene refers to the painting by Claude Lorrain, which is known by several names: Sacrifice to Apollo, Landscape with a Sacrifice to Apollo, The Father of Psyche Sacrificing in the Temple of Apollo. The painting depicts an episode of the myth of Psyche, according to which her parents decided to turn to the Oracle of Delphi with a question about the fate of their daughter. Here, first of all. significant is the semantics of the sacrifice – the calf, which in the world religions personified the generative, creative principle; the cow symbolized the Great Mother – in this case, the parallelism of the semantics of the vase and of the “depicted” on it is obvious. Secondly, Keats in the subtext of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” actualizes the opposition of Dionysus and Apollo, the elemental force of life and the prophetic power of art; at the same time, the associative potential of symbolic images going back to the set of myths about Apollo connects such antitheses as soul – body (Psyche – Daphne), beautiful – ugly, visible – hidden (Psyche – monster) to the basic opposition. The final meaning of Keats’s ode can be read not only as an apology for art, but also as a statement that art (the priest) sacrifices life itself and its spontaneous generating force to the beautiful, while the artist sacrifices his soul. The complex of motifs conventionally associated with the image of a vase and/or Keats’s ode was developed in the poems of Vyacheslav Ivanov, Maria Petrov, Alexander Kushner, Joseph Brodsky, Yunna Moritz, Larisa Miller. Based on the analysis of the reception of Keats’s ode in Russian poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries, the conclusion is made about the reduction of the mythological component of culture, the strengthening of the subjective interpretation of the figurative-motivic complex of the vase and the image on it.