Urns and Stuff...

So I was writing a post on Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and here's what I thought about it.
I have to admit, I was a bit leery coming to Ode on a Grecian Urn. The poem is almost a punch-line, associated with doe-eyed young poets in white shirts with flaring sleeves, open at the throat, sighing heavy sighs. Despite my early days as a poetry junkie, I'd somehow missed Ode, so I came to it with some preconceptions.
First time through, it struck me as vaguely...not to use a fifty-cent SAT word, but...pedestrian. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the urn was wicked pretty and stirred some wistful longing in Keats. Okay, next.
So then, I was standing in the rain, waiting to pick the kids up from school, and made another stab at it. Very different reading the second time around.
It seemed to me that Keats saw the best things in life, frozen in time upon the urn, and the figures' eternal static postures reminded him that all those good things are so transient in real life. They are captured in the urn, but that's the only permanent manifestation of all the good things...when experienced, they are fleeting, and the urn serves as a reminder for all time that the good things are impermanent, and maybe that's part of what makes them so dear.
I suppose watching all the little kids rip-snorting out of class at the end of the day reminded me of Keats urn. They all grow up, and end up with mortgages and divorces and bitterness; but for that one moment in time, frozen in my memory, they were all six years old and wild for life.
*sigh*
Oh well. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
~Jack