On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

“On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” is a sonnet by John Keats that first appeared in the London newspaper The Examiner in 1817. Keats reflects on the timeless allure of the ancient Greek sculptures known as the Elgin Marbles, which by their beauty remind him of his own smallness and the fact that he will someday die. Even these sculptures, which are able to captivate viewers long after they were first created, are hardly immune to the destructive effects of time, as they are badly damaged themselves.

Keats’s sonnet is an example of ekphrasis, that is, literature that describes a work of art. For Keats, the “Grecian grandeur” (Line 12) of the Elgin Marbles is a reminder of the transience of human achievement and of the poet’s own mortality. The Elgin Marbles is a collection of sculptures that were part of the Parthenon in Athens, brought to London in the early 1800s. They went on display not long before Keats wrote his famous poem. The Elgin Marbles almost immediately sparked controversy, with many objecting that the sculptures were brought to Britain illegally. Though Keats’s poem does not address these concerns, they are important for contextualizing his poem. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” displays characteristic elements of Romanticism with its emphasis on emotion and individual experience, and with its exploration of the themes of The Power and Importance of Art, The Burden of Mortality, and The Timelessness of Antiquity.

Poet Biography

John Keats was one of the most famous of the English Romantic poets. He was born on October 31, 1795, in Moorgate, London, the eldest of four children. Keats’s early years were marred by tragedy. His father, Thomas Keats, died of a skull fracture when Keats was just eight years old. His mother, Frances, remarried but also died soon after, when Keats was 14, leaving her four children in their grandmother’s custody. Though unruly as a child, Keats began to apply himself academically in his teens, developing a love for classics, literature, and history that would remain with him throughout his life.

In 1815, Keats began his medical training at Guy’s Hospital in London. But Keats’s true passion was writing, and in 1816, he abandoned medicine to pursue a career as a poet. In May 1816, Keats’s sonnet “O Solitude” was his first poem to be published. Later that year, Keats was introduced to the influential literary figure Leigh Hunt, who was also a close friend of the leading contemporary Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although Keats became friends with Hunt, he never became personally associated with the circle of Byron, Shelley, or the other major Romantic poets, who made him uneasy.

Keats followed his early publications with the first volume of his verse, Poems, which came out in 1817. The volume was not successful, but some contemporary critics, including Hunt, saw great promise in Keats and did what they could to support him and his literary career. Between 1818 and 1819, while staying at a house owned by his friend Charles Armitage Brown, Keats produced some of his most famous works, including his “Ode to a Nightingale” and his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” During this period, Keats began a relationship with Frances “Fanny” Brawne, who became his fiancée.

Keats’s life was cut short by illness. In 1817 and 1818, he was already beginning to show signs of tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother. In 1820, Keats’s condition deteriorated rapidly, and he traveled to Italy in search of a more favorable climate. Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821, at the age of 25.

Though he enjoyed limited success in his brief life and published only 54 poems in total, Keats soon become one of the most influential British poets. His poems, especially his odes, are known for their exploration of beauty, nature, and the complexities of human emotions. Keats’s legacy as a poet who embraced the transcendent power of art and the beauty of the natural world enshrined him as a key figure of Romanticism.

Poem Text

My spirit is too weak—mortality

  Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,

  And each imagined pinnacle and steep

Of godlike hardship tells me I must die

Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.

  Yet ’tis a gentle luxury to weep

  That I have not the cloudy winds to keep

Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.

Such dim-conceived glories of the brain

  Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;

So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,

  That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude

Wasting of old time—with a billowy main—

  A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

Keats, John. “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” 1817. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker studies the Elgin Marbles and depicts the “pinnacle and steep” (Line 3) of divine struggles, becoming acutely aware of his own weakness. The speaker is overwhelmed by a sense of his own mortality, by the inescapable fact that he must die someday. Yet there is something comforting about the ability to “weep” (Line 6) for one’s own mortality. Similarly, the sight of the “Grecian grandeur” (Line 12) of the Elgin Marbles fills the speaker with awe but also with “a most dizzy pain” (Line 11), for, despite their beauty, the sculptures have been damaged by time.