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
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