On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1817

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is a Petrarchan sonnet (sometimes known as the Italian sonnet, associated with the 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch). This is a 14-line poem divided into two sections. The first section is an eight-line stanza (called an octave) while the second is a six-line stanza (called a sestet). The entire sonnet is written in iambic pentameter, like most English sonnets. An iamb is a metrical foot in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM), while “pentameter” means that each line is composed of five such feet. But like most iambic poems, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” sometimes introduces metrical variations to make the rhythm more dynamic, for instance, by substituting a trochee (DUM-da) or a spondee (DUM-DUM) for the typical iamb in some lines. A good example is Line 5, where the first foot is replaced with a trochee, while the second foot is replaced with a spondee: “Like a / sick ea / gle look / ing at / the sky.”

The sonnet also employs a rhyme scheme, with each of the two sections or stanzas of the sonnet employing its own rhyme scheme: The introductory octave follows an ABBA rhyme scheme, while the concluding sestet uses a CDCDCD rhyme scheme. This emphasizes the division of the poem into two distinct parts. This division suits the content of the poem, too, with Keats using the first eight lines—the octave—to reflect on his own mortality, while the volta, or turn, in Line 9 marks a shift to his meditation that even the enduring Elgin Marbles are subject to the effects of time.

Allusion

Allusions are references within a text to objects or subjects (including other texts) that exist outside of the text. Allusions rely on a reader’s prior familiarity with the object or subject of the allusion so as to enhance their understanding of the significance of the text. Allusions are typically differentiated from straightforward references by their indirectness—that is, allusions are revealed through hints that readers must recognize and decode themselves.

Keats’s poem is extremely allusive in its treatment of the Elgin Marbles specifically and classical antiquity generally. The Elgin Marbles are a collection of sculptures that were created to decorate the Parthenon in Athens in the fifth century BCE. Over the millennia, they were damaged considerably (especially by war) and in the early 19th century were brought to Britain by Lord Elgin (See: Background). The reader must know all this to fully understand the poem, but Keats does not mention any of this himself in the text, though he does allude to the history of the sculptures. In speaking of the “imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship” (Lines 3-4), for instance, the speaker alludes to the mythological scenes represented on many of the sculptures, which themselves have a separate story of Greek history. In referring to the sculptures as “Grecian grandeur” (Line 12), the speaker alludes not only to their country of origin but also to the grand history of intricate ancient Greek sculptures.

Simile and Metaphor

A simile is a literary device or figure of speech that compares two dissimilar things to each other. A simile is usually signaled by the words “like” or “as” (a simile is thus differentiated from the literary device of metaphor, which assimilates two dissimilar things to each other without using “like” or “as”). Keats uses simile in his poem at several points as he imagines The Burden of Mortality, for instance, when he likens the way mortality weighs on him to “unwilling sleep” (Line 2) or when he compares his awareness of his inevitable death to “a sick eagle looking at the sky” (Line 5). At the end of the poem, the speaker introduces another simile when he imagines the “Grecian grandeur” (Line 12) of the Elgin Marbles being mingled with the effects of time but also “with a billowy main— / A sun—a shadow of a magnitude” (Lines 13-14).

The poem itself, however, can be interpreted as a metaphor on a larger structural level, with the reflections on the speaker’s individual mortality in the first part of the poem—the introductory octave of the Petrarchan sonnet—serving as a metaphor for the “undescribable feud” (Line 10) and “most dizzy pain” (Line 11) of realizing that even enduring works of art like the Elgin Marbles are not immune to “the rude / Wasting of old time” (Lines 12-13): Life and art, while superficially dissimilar, are actually similar because neither is immortal.