Ode on a Grecian URL

To behold the third hebdomadal assignment, cast thy eyes downward.

I've failed to illustrate our poems since Wordsworth; of course, it's hard to find good pictures of Death-in-Life and Life-in-Death playing craps.

Anyway, as we are reading poems about fairly specific, often obscure objects it is good to remind ourselves of what these objects look like.

First, click here a picture and short description of an Eolian harp; there's also a link to an amazing sound file of the harp playing.


Athenian red figure calyx krater dated to the 5th century BC; in the Getty Museum, photograph by Mharrsch.

This is not the precise urn Keats had in mind - in fact, no urn matches Keats's description. It is the dramatic style of these red-figure vessels that affected Keats more generally: the dynamic figures frozen in mid-action; the exquisite pace of the narrative and scene as it is set around the circumference of the pottery.

If you get a chance, visit our Chazen Museum to see some beautiful examples of this kind of pottery.


The frieze from the Parthenon (Athens, 5th century BC), acquired by Lord Elgin; displayed at the British Museum, photograph by Furcafe.
Some of Flickr's better pictures of the Elgin marbles understandably have stricter copyright protections. To get a better sense of what Keats may have been responding to, consult Zambizi Prime's dramatic detail of a metope and Trenchfoot's photograph of the Parthenon's partially reconstructed pediment.