“’Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”
– John Keats
These lines from John Keats’ poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ are no doubt impactful but the hardest to interpret. The reader is confused on whether the Urn is addressing humankind or the speaker is talking to the Urn. Despite the confusion, there seems to be a general understanding and an important equation between truth and beauty.
Beauty and Truth are very effectively linked to each other in these last two lines, where the reader is free to interpret it the way he/she understands. If the speaker is addressing the Urn, then these lines illustrate the awareness of the Urn’s limitations. The Urn only knows beauty from the beautiful pictures the artist has drawn and knew the truth from the stories these pictures depict. If the Urn is addressing humankind, then there is a moral lesson of honesty and grace. This moral lesson teaches us that the only graceful thing on earth is truth itself and so this is the only knowledge a human must have while he/she is still breathing.
In the overall poem, the reader thinks about the beauties the Urn depicts, whereas in these last two lines the reader stops to think about the beauties and graces of earth and what they really are.