Scan the line of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" from "When old age" to "ye need to know."

Scansion is the formal term for marking the meter of a
poem, which is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in each line. A stressed
syllable may sound “longer” than an unstressed syllable, so to scan a poem, you listen
to how each syllable of each word sounds.

One way to tell
whether a syllable is stressed or unstressed is to place your hand under your chin as
you say the word aloud. When your jaw moves down, that syllable is a stressed
syllable—it takes longer to say. Each group of two syllables (regardless of where the
words themselves are) is called a foot, and there are many different types of feet. The
most common is the iamb, in which the first syllable is unstressed, and the second is
stressed.

The stresses in language help us understand the
connotation, or meaning, of the words themselves. For example, think about the phrase,
“Oh, sure,” which could also represent one metrical foot. If you stress the second word
more than the first word, you sound sarcastic. But if you stress both words equally when
you speak this phrase aloud, you sound like you’re in total agreement. This kind of
double stressed foot is called a spondee.

Poets craft these
rhythms to contribute to the overall meaning of the poems. John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian
Urn” describes the scenes depicted on an ancient urn, and much of the poem is a
meditation on the nature of art, which is to say, the nature of trying to capture life
through a lifeless object, which is a paradox. Keats explores many philosophical ideas
in this poem, which he asserts in the final stanza.

The
first five lines of this last stanza are mostly iambic pentameter, which is a meter in
which each line has ten syllables, and the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, and 10th syllables are
stressed. However, in Keats’ poem, this pattern changes with the sixth line. If you say
the lines aloud, they sound like this, with the stressed syllables in all
capitals:

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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

Ye KNOW on EARTH, and ALL ye NEED to
KNOW.

Notice the three
stressed syllables of “old age shall” and then again with “truth, truth beauty” in the
ninth line, though the rest of the stanza keeps a strict iambic pentameter. By inserting
spondees into his final stanza (“age shall” and “truth beauty”) Keats draws our
attention to these “super-stressed” ideas, though the ultimate meaning behind these last
lines has been debated.