On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1817

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Elgin Marbles

The Elgin Marbles are the central symbol of the poem, representing the themes of The Power and Importance of Art and The Timelessness of Antiquity but also serving as a reminder of The Burden of Mortality—both the speaker’s own individual mortality as well as the wear and aging to which even great works of art are ultimately subject. Though the poem is, in a sense, an ekphrastic poem, the speaker never describes the Elgin Marbles themselves in any detailed way, focusing instead on the emotions they evoke in him. These sculptures, created in ancient Athens in the fifth century BCE, represent to the speaker the “imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship” (Lines 3-4); they are “wonders” (Line 11) for him to behold, and they represent the allure of classical antiquity, the “Grecian grandeur” (Line 12). By their very power, the Elgin Marbles make the speaker feel “weak” (Line 1) in comparison, reminding him of his own mortality. But the sculptures also remind him of something even more disturbing than his mortality: For all their beauty and timelessness, the Elgin Marbles the speaker sees have been badly damaged over the millennia, causing him to feel “a most dizzy pain” (Line 11) as he reflects that even these symbols of enduring human achievements are not immortal, that they too are subject to “the rude / Wasting of old time” (Lines 12-13).

Nature

Keats uses natural imagery in the poem to add vividness to his poem and to illustrate its central themes, especially the theme of the burden of mortality. The image of the “sick eagle looking at the sky” (Line 5), for instance, becomes a poignant metaphor for the inevitability of death. But the eagle, the symbol of the Greek god Zeus, is also evocative of the timeless antiquity Keats encounters in the Elgin Marbles. The eagle, symbol of antiquity, is a reminder that even the most noble aspects of our existence, including great works of art like the Elgin Marbles, are ultimately subject to destruction and death.

Yet there is something comforting, for the speaker, in being only a mortal human and thus being able to escape the vastness and eternity of the natural world: The speaker reflects that it is a “luxury” (Line 6) for him to be able to weep “[t]hat [he] ha[s] not the cloudy winds to keep / Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye” (Lines 7-8). As an individual human, the speaker’s mortality is a more tolerable burden. What is harder to bear is not human mortality so much as the fact that even the ”Grecian grandeur” (Line 12) of the Elgin Marbles must ultimately be subject to time, an idea again evoked with natural imagery as the speaker imagines these sculptures as “a billowy main— / A sun—a shadow of a magnitude” (Lines 13-14).

Time

Time is the inexorable force underlying Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” reminding the speaker of the burden of his own mortality but also of the wear and tear that gradually erodes the power and importance of art, and even the timelessness of antiquity. In the poem, time is a kind of tyrannical force. In the form of the speaker’s mortality, this force makes the speaker feel weak and “[w]eighs heavily on [him] like unwilling sleep” (Line 2). The passage of time is evoked in the speaker’s allusions to the “imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship” (Lines 3-4) he finds depicted on the ancient Elgin Marbles, in the image of the “sick eagle looking at the sky” (Line 5), in the vast “cloudy winds” (Line 7) kept “[f]resh for the opening of the morning’s eye” (Line 8). All these ideas, these “dim-conceived glories of the brain” (Line 9), remind the speaker of his humble place in the great expanse of time, reminding him that he is small and weak in comparison and “must die” (Line 4).

But it is not only the speaker’s own individual life that is subject to time. What also truly troubles the speaker by the end of the poem is not so much his own mortality but instead the “most dizzy pain / That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude / Wasting of old time” (Lines 11-13). Even the great achievements of human art, achievements that outlast the lives of countless individuals, are in the end no match for the destructive power of time.