Keats uses compulsive-sounding repetition of words like happy and forever to "communicate something about the speaker that runs counter to his words. It reminds me of those times when you hear someone insist on how happy they are, but you know they're just trying to will that fact into existence by speaking it." In the course of the poem, "the speaker begins to doubt his own cravings for the permanence of art. Is it really as perfect as he imagines?" Throughout, "he's looked to the urn, to art, to assuage his despair about life," a task to which it finally proves not quite equal. "In life, things change and fade, but they're real. In art, things may be eternal, but they're lifeless." The famous final lines of "Ode on a Grecian Urn" arrive at the conclusion that "beauty is truth, truth beauty," and how literal an interpretation to grant it remains a matter of debate. It may not really be all we know on Earth, nor even all we need to know, but the fact