Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape?

These lines open John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), one of his great odes written during his annus mirabilis of intense poetic production. Keats addresses an ancient Greek urn as if it were a living presence, using apostrophe to animate an artwork that preserves scenes of ritual and desire. Composed amid Keats’s preoccupation with transience, illness, and the fragility of human happiness, the poem contrasts mortal experience—subject to time and change—with the urn’s frozen, enduring images. The speaker’s questions (“What leaf-fring’d legend…?”) dramatize an encounter with classical art as both historical artifact and imaginative provocation.

Keats frames the urn as paradox: a “bride of quietness” and “foster-child of silence,” untouched (“unravish’d”) by time’s consummation yet intimately bound to it (“slow time”). As a “Sylvan historian,” the urn tells stories without words, offering a “flowery tale” more alluring than poetry because it is permanently visible and inexhaustible to interpretation. The speaker’s questions underscore both the richness and the opacity of art: the images suggest mythic narratives (“leaf-fring’d legend”) but refuse definitive explanation. The passage introduces the ode’s central tension between the permanence of aesthetic form and the restless, temporal nature of human desire and understanding.

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?