Constructed Response

Answer:

Students’ responses will vary. A sample response follows: The poem’s primary theme is the lasting power of art. The speaker celebrates the permanence of art, which, when it achieves true beauty, transcends anything else in life. The couple on the urn, the group in pursuit from the first stanza, the priest, heifer, and crowd at the sacrifice, even the absent, empty town from which the religious celebrants have come—all these are metaphors that symbolize one of the great triumphs of art; the capture of an ephemeral moment in an eternal form. The superiority of immortal art to mortal life is perhaps most clearly expressed in the paradoxical statement, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” In real life a tune played on a flute will vanish into the air, but the unidentified tune captured for the imagination on the urn has become immortal.