After Keats, Millennia after Plato...

My first poem on here for a while is a reflection upon Keats' Ode to a Greek Urn. At the end of his poem, Keats seems to be saying that truth equates to beauty, and that the urn is telling us just that, but it's more likely a reference to Plato, whom I paraphrase here. Plato, for his part, feels that beauty can be a result, a consequence of truth - specifically truth in matters of the heart.

Keats is reflecting on the lives of the characters depicted on the urn, but also the life of the person whose ashes the urn contains, and he seems to draw attention to the appropriateness of the images from life to the representation of truth by the depiction of beauty:

Equating truth with beauty sees us fall
too eagerly for traps our eyes have set,
for beauty may delude us, after all.

But may we find this correlation yet
is less deceit and more simplicity?
For Plato said of this: As we apply
love's true expression, so will beauty be.
(Though not the obverse, we may hear him sigh).

To fall for beauty may be self-deceit,
but truth holds its own beauty: though we say
these urn-borne tales are simple, incomplete,
there are both truth and beauty in the clay.

For what survives, collected in the urn -
the urn and ashes from a mortal's pyre -
is death's own view of life, which cannot burn,
and our best hope for truth - beyond the fire.

Roy