What is the author's style in Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats?

The ode is an ancient form originally written for musical accompaniment. The word itself is of Greek origin, meaning "sung." While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe, anti strophe, and epode, the form by Keats's time had undergone enough transformation that it really represented a manner-rather than a set methodfor writing a certain type of lyric poetry. In gen eral, the ode ot the Romantic era is a poem of 30 to 200 lines that meditates progressively upon or directly addresses a single object or condition. In addition to "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats wrote odes about the season of autumn and the song of a nightingale as well as about indolence, melancholy, and even the poet John Milton's hair. Keats's odes are characterized by an exalted and highly lyrical tone, and while they employ specific stanza forms and rhyme schemes, these can vary from ode to ode.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" consists of eight, tenline stanzas, each following a single rhyme scheme that combines the quatrain of a Shakespearean sonnet with the sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet. Thus, the first four lines of each stanza rhyme abab while the predominant rhyme scheme of the last six lines is cdecde. The reader will notice that the sestet's rhyme scheme varies in each of the first two stanzas: in the first, it is cdedce; in the second, it is cdeced. In these stanzas, however, the poem's order-the hierarchy of its three principle symbols has yet to be resolved. In the third stanza, "wild ecstasy" yields to a controlled interpretation of the urn's representations, and from that point the sestets assume the traditional Petrarchan order.

Thematically, Keats attempts to compose the stanzas in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are just as their hybrid rhyme scheme would suggest. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the three quatrains present some problem or question to be reconciled in the final couplet. In a Petrarchan sonnet, a similar concept is reconciled in the last six lines. Thus, in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the quatrain tends to present a problem or condition that is addressed, explained or elaborated in the sestet. Consider, for instance, the first stanza. While the quatrain tells us that the poet cannot adequately express the "flowery tale" depicted on the urn, the sestet reveals why: the urn's pictures raise a string of questions that language alone cannot answer.