Ode on a Gricean Urn

M. Davidson and I seem to share that Keats' poem is overrated. For one, it doesn't rhyme.

At

http://lsv.uky.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind0812D&L=CLASSICS-L&P=R11149&I=-3

I focus on Keat's alleged 'couplet'. The one in the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" goes:

Is / em / ptied / of / its / folk // this / pious / morn
And / little / town / thy / streets / for / e /ver / more
Will /si / lent / be / and / not /a / soul / to / tell
Why / thou / art / de / so / late / can / e'er / re / turn.

I believe 'quietness' and 'ex'press' is another type of ryme. I am thinking
of T. B's def. from the Random House Unabridged: "rhyme in which either the vowels or the consonants of stressed syllables are identical." -- where I suppose we take the 'rn' cluster in "moRN" and 'retuRN' to apply? And cfr. 'pastoral' and 'all':

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! / When old age shall this generation waste,
/ Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man,
to whom thou say'st, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all.

Meant to rhyme, I suppose, but ain't pastoral /pastor-schwa-l/ while 'all'
/o:ll/ (In fact I tend to find 'Arcadee' and 'ecstasee' too feminine to my taste?)

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? / What men or gods are these? What maidens
loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and
timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Isn't the 'th' of 'both' aspirated while the 'th' in 'loth' ain't? The OED only recognises /loudh/ and spells it 'lothe', I'm confused).

Of deities or mortals, or of both, /In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? / What
men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

I also believe the 'unheard' and 'en'DEAR'ed' is a case of

'certified poet of Slough' M. Davidson ('never bloody minded') case:

eye, rather than ear-rhyme.

Is 'ear-rhyme a retronym? cfr. pararhyme as opposed to ...? -- cfr. paraDOX, not a dox?):

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye
soft pipes, play on; / Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

And while 'priest' was one of the earliest words to be incorporated into
English, I do believe it's /pri:st/ -- by Keats' time -- never /'prest/, rite?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead'st thou that heifer lowing
at the skies, / And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

"the Ode “is a work of what I want to call Cockney classicism. Thomas Rowlandson’s caricatures … to show how Cockney poems like ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Keats was derided for a slightly different quality. Keats, for example, was accused of "low diction" for rhyming

"thorns

and

fawns

in "Sleep and Poetry" and other rhymes ['morn' and 'return' in "Ode", etc.
JLS] which suggested a working class speech".

Then let us clear away the choaking thorns / From round its gentle stem; let
the young fawns,

Keats, 'a boy of pretty abilities [which he spoiled]'. 'real WEAKNESSES, as
lack of classical scholarship, the use of Cockney rimes like higher, Thalia;
ear, Clytherea; thorn, fawn." (Cited in Colvin, _Keats_, p. 307).

Cfr. Grice on 'suggested'. "I want to say that 'implicate' will do duty for
'mean', 'imply' and 'suggest'. Cfr.D. Holdcroft, "Forms of Indirect
Communication", Journal of Rhetoric. Of course, not all 'suggestion' is _intentional_, though, but in Grice's favoured sense it would.

“The term ['Cockney school', sic. JLS] ... was, instead, an attack on the
class background of the author..."
... "and their aspirations to the highest level
of the literati"
Cfr. the REAL classical classics, of the Haydon school of painting, etc.

> The ... [Grecian? JLS] democratic ideology ... were offensive to the
Blackwoods review staff, and the cultural and class background of the
authors was introduced as a mechanism.
...


"how offensive it was to the establishment that lower class persons might emerge."
Emerge to what? Submerge, in the case of Keats? Cfr. T. L.'s unreplied
criticism to his 'snob'? use of 'top of academia'! But seriously: I'm too much of a classicist to be wedded to rhyme, and indeed, I feel it destroys (or can destroy) a good aria: I cannot _focus_ on 'fuggita' or 'vita' while I sing "E lucevan le stelle' for example: it should be _reason_, never rhyme that leads me, even if it's a reason of the heart, to echo Pascal.

In Grice's vein, rhyme brought to the descendants of Latin, a new 'idiom'
but whatever you can say in rhyme, you _should_ also say in Reason, alla Virgil. Or not.