 urn’s images—the pipes and their imagined melodies and a lover attempting to kiss the maiden—and comments on their eternal sameness. He notes that although the melodies being played by the pipers on the urn cannot be heard, this silence is somehow better, perhaps because the melodies dwell in a higher part of the mind, or the imagination or fancy, as this part of the mind had been termed at the time: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ Are sweeter.”
The poet also addresses the youthful lover, presumably one of the pursuing men of stanza one. Though this lover will never catch his maiden for a kiss, she can never fade nor ever become less than fair, thus implying that the imagined world on the vase is superior to the real world of experience.
In stanza three, the poet seems to envy the figures fixed on the urn, whose happiness and love will remain forever. To some readers, however, the middle of the stanza shows the poet, in his progressive reflection on the urn, not so sure of the superiority of art (the pictorial representation on the urn) to experience. The repetitive language here is perhaps indicating an ironic tone, and there is a release from a rapt contemplation of the urn.
In stanza four, the poet describes a different side of the urn, which depicts a heifer being led to a ritual slaughter while a small town is abandoned by its inhabitants—a desolate scene, an apparent change of tone from the previous stanza (unless read as ironic). To some critics the second and third stanzas are digressions; the poet returns to the urn and its meaning in this fourth stanza.
Finally, in the last stanza, the poet makes his last pronouncements to the urn, which seems to speak in the final two lines. The poet is released from his reverie, or rapt contemplation, of the urn. The pastoral scene (the word “pastoral” brings to mind rural perfection and happiness) is thought of as cold, though it is reaffirmed as lasting longer than the present generation. In the final two lines, the poet tells readers what message the urn would pronounce, if it could speak: that truth and beauty are equivalent—an idea that was current in the Romantic criticism and philosophy of Keats’s time.