Odes are traditionally addresses to the gods of some kind, sung in praise, supplication and/or beseeching. Keats’s odes are addressed to an electic set of god-like things. The order in which they were written in a matter of some controversy but according to one arrangement the odes are addressed:
1. [To a mood (indolence) (which we’re not reading)]
2. To a goddess (psyche)
3. To a nightingale
4. To an urn
5. To an emotion (melancholy)
6. To a season (autumn)
In his letter on the “Vale of Soul-Making” Keats argues that salvation requires “the medium of a world like this;” in other words, the soul isn’t otherworldly but strictly a function of worldly existence. A great way to think about Keats’s odes is as worldly media of soul making: aesthetic experiences through which something like soul gets generated. The most tangibly worldly of the entities to which Keats’s odes are addressed are the nightingale and the urn, whereas the one that is most recognizably ode-like and concerned with salvation is the Ode to Psyche. So good general question to ask is what do the odes to psyche, nightingale and Grecian urn do differently? All present an image of immortality in one way or another; but do the various images of immortality have different implications?
Psyche
In light of Keats’s critique of Christianity in his letter on soul-making, is his talk of worship in Psyche to be taken literally? is he proposing a kind of religious practice here? what could it mean to worship in a church of the mind? wouldn’t this be at odds with Keats’s insistence that the soul is rather worldly rather just spiritual?
A large section of this poem is repeated; what is the significance and function of this repetition? does this give it a ritualistic form?
Nightingale & Urn
In nightingale the sense of sight is sacrificed to that of hearing, just as in the urn the sense of hearing is sacrificed to that of sight. So a crucial two-part question to ask in these poems is: 1) what’s the specific way in which sounds and sights respectively ‘speak’ to us? what does one ‘say’ better/worse than the other? what is at stake in each particular mode of aesthetic reception? what are the respective connotations of visual and auditory images? and 2) how is Keats playing these connotations off of one another? does he finally value them more for what they can or for what they can’t ‘say’?
romanticism 
In Grecian Urn, how does Keats create a connection with the inanimate figures depicted? What does he see in the people who are about to kiss that is elusive to our mortal human experience?
Keats relishes the sights and sounds that are not given him by the nightingale or the urn, respectively. To show this, he listens to the bird in darkness, although it can be heard during the day. Similarly, he poses several questions to the urn which he knows it cannot answer.
In the absence of all senses, Keats is more free to use his imagination. He can take the stimulus of one sense and create a world from it. Hence, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats dwells upon serene and pleasing images. In “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he imbues the urn with knowledge, attributing the phrase “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” to the silent object. The senses the Keats ‘fills in’ in his poems represent his soul. What he imagines is a reflection of what he values most.
I think Keats makes the urn significant through his description of the beauty of seeing the piece in front of him. Therefore, Keats becomes an observer of the urn as seeing it in front of him gives it meaning and significance. In comparison, sounds of a specific thing may give an indication that it is there but is not as obvious and definite as seeing the particular thing itself. So I guess what I am getting at is that although hearing may give a better understanding of what the thing is, actually seeing gives the thing worth and allows the observer to define the thing from their own eyes. I think Keats values the importance of sound but is unable to hear sounds of both the nightingale or the urn such that he decides to define both things in his own terms creating very descriptive accounts of seeing the urn and the nightingale’s beauty. I guess sound then can sometimes restrict one’s definition of a thing and having only the sense of seeing perhaps allows the observer to create their own personal definition and relationship to various things.
It’s interesting that while in these Odes Keats is concerned with soul creation, and a higher consciousness wrought by aesthetic experience, he’s still very much involved in the sensuousness of his poetic language and the materiality of his descriptions.
For Keats, the transcendent is involved with and indistinguishable from the corporeal. Although we could say that ‘Nightingale’ is characterized by its emphasis on the aural, while ‘Grecian Urn’ by that of the visual, it might be more helpful to describe both poems as subverting the hegemony of either sense, in favour of the plenitude of the total sensual experience.
So, while inspired by the initial nightingale song, his “Ode to a Nightingale” is less dependent on the presence of sound than the absence of sight, while simultaneously exploring the potential of taste and smell. Thus, in Stanza 2 we have these lush descriptions of the taste of wine “Cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth, / Tasting of flora and the country green”, and, “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth”. And in Stanza 5, similarly, at the same time as he defines his loss of sight, the speaker, by way of smell, “in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet / Wherewith the seasonable month endows / The grass, the thicket…” etc.
In the same way, a large part of “on a Grecian Urn” is devoted to defining the figures by their lack of sound — “Thou still unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time” — , while by way of its presence to the visual domain, the entire sensual universe of the figures is directly evoked, rooting the Keatsian soul-creation in this sensual ‘hyper-materialism’. Thus, the “silent form, dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity”.