Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on…

The lines close the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. In the last stanza, Keats addresses the urn directly: an “Attic shape” decorated with marble men and maidens, a “silent form” that teases us “out of thought / As doth eternity”. When old age has wasted this generation, the urn will remain, “a friend to man”, and will say these words. The earlier stanzas show why: on the urn, the lover will never kiss his beloved, but she will never fade; the trees will never lose their leaves; the little town emptied for a sacrifice will be silent forever.

Keats wrote the ode in 1819, one of the great odes of that year, and published it in 1820, months before his death in Rome at twenty-five.

In the 1820 edition, the quotation marks enclose only the first five words, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. Readers still debate who speaks the rest, the urn or the poet, and what exactly this equation of beauty and truth means.

Ode on a Grecian Urn, last lines, 1820

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work