Tattoo Ode to Keats (image from Flickr)
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THOU still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time
-John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
Slow Time
I mentioned (here) that Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn figures heavily in my pantheon of influential works. The famous spondee “slow Time” remains one reason. As I said before, the line made Grace smile and giggle as a baby, which is partly what made me repeat over and over again her her, suturing it into my brain. It has a music to it. The line just skips up and down—thou foster child—then quiets with “silence” and brakes into “slow time.”
It is a moment in the poem before the ravishing of the following lines where Keats whispers a kind of invocation. A supplication to beauty, which for Keats is an apostrophe to truth.
Brain Stem
Audiologists know that spondees function differently on the brain and on hearing, that they hold special “spectral characteristics.” Because of the way the stress falls on a spondee, we tend to speak such words and phrases at the same volume and often at a similar frequency.
