Abstract
Among the most poignant lines in Keats’s poetry are those that compose the fourth stanza of the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:
Who are those coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.
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Notes
The motif is explored in numerous nineteenth-century works, the most notable perhaps being Poe’s “The Oval Portrait,” in which a painter, once having successfully transferred a real woman onto his canvas, confronts a dead model. See Newton Arvin, “Counterfeit Presentments,” Partisan Review 15 (June, 1948) pp. 673–80.
Thomas Whitaker, Swan and Shadow: Yeats’s Dialogue with History ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964 ).
Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1955) pp. 23–4.
See for example Robert Martin Adams, Nil; Episodes in the Literary Conquest of Void During the Nineteenth Century ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1966 ).
Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method, trans. Jane E. Lewis ( Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972 ).
Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” Collected Poems ( New York: Knopf, 1968 ) p. 10.
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© 1982 Richard J. Finneran
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Engelberg, E. (1982). Absence and Presence in Yeats’s Poetry. In: Finneran, R.J. (eds) Yeats Annual No. 1. Macmillan Literary Annuals S.. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05324-7_2
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