[1] Of course, a play on Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”  I tried to reverse everything Keats had put into his original.  I in fact typed this into the word processor, by highlighting words of the Keats and retyping my own lines; the scansion and rhyme scheme are very nearly identical, and the number of stanzas and lines is the same.  In the “Ode,” Norton tells us, “Keats found the perfect correlative for his concern with the longing for permanence in a world of change” (822).  So I wanted to picture the Urn as a more Wordsworthian thing, a masterpiece of nature that has been vandalized by a parade of historic cultures.  Keats’s internal verses describe three scenes carved in bas-relief upon the urn, which will ever be undecayed and also unchanging, unfinishable.  So in my internal verses I select historical scenes in which the Urn was subjected to the indignities of art schools and their personnel—students and teachers alike.  This parallels the habit some scholars have of “reading into” literature, subjecting a classic work of art to a critic’s own pet theory, for example seeing Oedipal complexes in Hamlet and feminist struggles in Jane Eyre—anachronistic, at least.  These verses (2-4) take the form of a tour of scenes in the life of the Urn—a combination, perhaps, of Scrooge’s tour in “A Christmas Carol” and The Red Violin. 

[2]   Michelangelo was excellent at portraying the natural human form, during the Renaissance.

[3]   Both “hock” and “pawn” (the latter having here a dual meaning) suggest that the Urn has been reduced to an item in a hockshop, or pawnshop, exchanged there by someone in exchange for a little cash—and then forgotten.

[4]   This is Blake’s spelling, originally a simple typographical error that emphasizes the archaism of the scene; it stayed.

[5]   Keats referred to “Bold lovers”

[6]   Both “Cretans” here and “Parisites,” later, were devised by myself long ago as a way to insult residents of a specific place; they were both placed into the poem from the earliest conceptualizations of the poem.

[7]   Cf. “Jason and the Argonauts,” which I think is from Greek myth.  These are portrayed here as the first literary or artistic agents, getting money from the efforts of Nature.

[8]   Of course “chiseler” is here used more literally than usually; so is “hack.”

[9]   The first reference to the effacatory work that overtheoretical scholars teach the next generation to do, disfiguring the appearance of a perfectly good classic.

[10]   Robert Burns’s “Green Grow the Rashes” states that Nature’s “ ‘prentice han’ she tried on man,/An’ then she made the lasses, O.”  Here the apprentices are literal. 

[11]   Keats’s fourth verse refers to a “heifer lowing at the skies” led by a “mysterious priest”; this conflates the two.  I loved the image of the priest lowing at the skies.

[12]   Dryads and naiads are mythical spirits of nature:  trees, and water, respectively. 

[13]   This is my quickie summary of the scenes described by Keats in his Ode, suitably exaggerated.

[14]   This conflates two Beatles’ songs:  Paul’s “Mother Nature’s Son” and John’s unreleased “Child of Nature,” an early lyric to the melody released as “Jealous Guy” (not Jell-O Sky, as I thought before)

[15]   Usually employed to mean that something is incomprehensible, in English [in German they say that something comes across like Spanish!]; here the Artisan imagined that Nature’s beautiful work (the volcanic stone that was about to become an urn) could be improved by carving it into an “Attic shape;” the narrator disagrees.

[16]   Punning on “magnum opus,” or “great work”

[17]   I.e., vomited on in their drunkenness.  Bacchus was the god of wine.  Vomiting is sometimes referred to as “the Technicolor yawn;” here it is imagined that such vomitus could nurture the plants as much as the Master’s body could nourish the worms.

[18]   This line originally read, “Now, deep Frieze, take two thousand years’ respite.”  My Romantic Poetry instructor, the famous Taiwanese poet Yu Guang Zhong, to whom this piece is dedicated, commented that the deliberately forced mispronunciation of “respite” did not work; this is my workaround phrase.

[19]   The next stop on the tour of the Urn’s life is approximately 1950s-‘60s Paris Jazz scene.  This stereotypical bassist clearly is a party animal, drinking and using drugs, and failing to attend classes.

[20]   I got a kick out of archaizing these more modern words, which rendered them nearly unpronounceable.  Mocking the poetical tradition of mangling grammar to force rhyming and scansion was also enjoyable.

[21]   The expected rhyme is “ass” but Keat’s proscribed rhyme scheme disallows it.

[22]   Initially I wanted to reference Blake’s “The Tyger” with its “what the hammer, what the chain” phrases that clearly wanted some mockery; this is all that is left.

[23]   Again “hammering” away at the point that refiguring/disfiguring of the classics that takes place at colleges of Arts and Sciences.

[24]   Cf. Handel, “All we, like sheep,/have gone Astray”

[25]   The Tour Eiffel is the most famous landmark in Paris, France.

[26]   In Keats’s fifth verse he addresses the Urn as an “Attic shape,” which is to say, a shape from ancient Greece.

[27]   The most twisted sentence, grammatically speaking, in this poem.

[28]   Cf. “with rue my heart is laden”

[29]   Cf. Webster, The Duchess of Malfi:  “Precious girn, rogue. . . .:”  a kind of facial grimace.

[30]   Cf. the Rutles’ song (the Rutles being mostly Neil Innes’s work) from Archaeology:  “Back in ‘64”

[31]   Some churlish people might call my daughter a “cross-breed”, half Caucasian and half Asian; Keats wrote of the interwoven pattern (brede) carved onto the Urn.

[32]   That ought to have been “hallowed,” not “hollowed.”

[33]   An excellent, poetic word, which sounds lovely when (like the final word of the poem) is read with a John Morely “buhhhhhnisht.” 

[34]   Too true, too true!  “Friend[s] to man” ought not be forced on one.

[35]    Cf. Keats’s last “stinger:” “all ye need to know.”

[36]   I had composed a report on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest the previous school year.

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