Reading Keats’s “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles”: The Materiality and Mortality of the Fragmented Marbles

Abstract

Keats’s sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817) records the poet’s aesthetic reaction to Greek marble statues installed in the British Museum, which were originally part of the Parthenon in Athens and transported to Britain by Lord Elgin. The marbles’s aesthetic effect on Keats, I would argue, is inextricably bound up with his instant recognition of their materiality, which becomes plainly evident to him in their fragmentary state. The syntactic fragmentation of Keats’s sonnet (especially its sestet) appears to imitate, ekphrastically, the fragmented forms of the sculptures. The aesthetic experience related in the sonnet arises from Keats’s intense awareness of the decay of the marbles: they have eroded away over time and were cut into pieces by man’s activity. In Keats’s view, the aesthetic power of ancient artifacts has a basis in their material limits. While most of the enthusiastic reviews of Elgin’s collection at the time disregarded its fragmented condition, Keats is made painfully aware of that condition—perhaps thanks to his lack of in-depth knowledge of classical Greek art—and thereby of his own mortality. In his sonnet on the Parthenon marbles, thoughts of materiality and mortality are closely interwoven. The state of physical deterioration to which even the great art of the past succumbs—that is to say, the obvious fact that even the marbles do not outlast time—forces him to contemplate his own death, and further, the fragility of poetic fame. The broken nature of the marbles held in the museum leads Keats to appreciate their aesthetic beauty in relation to the history in which they are steeped. The material decay that temporality has caused to the Elgin Marbles overwhelms the poet with a sense of mortality, fate that he himself and all artistic achievements, perhaps his own poetry, cannot be spared.