Thou still unravished bride of quietness: Keats addresses a Greek vase and finds in its frozen scenes an image of eternity. The lovers on the urn will never kiss, but they will never grow old; the town emptied for the sacrifice will never be repopulated. Keats was twenty-three, already suffering the tuberculosis that would kill him two years later, and the poem vibrates with awareness of mortality and the longing to escape it. Beauty is truth, truth beauty: the final lines have been debated for two centuries. The ode is both celebration and elegy, both escape from time and acknowledgment that we cannot escape. The urn remains, silent and cold.