by Al Provinziano

The purpose of my essay is to expose the submerged argumentative address to the reader. I chose a modified Venn-diagram because it allows access to show how the different spheres of address and reception interweave to present Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

The author is represented as an axis through the spheres because he orders the poem, gives it a stanza and rhyme structure, along with the implicit aesthetic philosophy behind the poem. The author's color is gray because he has an opaque explicit presence in the poem. He tries to submerge the structure of the poem in the dialogue between the speaker and the urn. Therefore, in symmetry with the poem, the author is represented in the other spheres as merely a dotted line because his presence is submerged - like the structure and order he provides - in the other spheres of reception in the poem.

The speaker is red because brightness is associated with intense emotions which represents the speaker's empathy for the Urn's images. The speaker's words are also rounded to represent his emotional qualities, in contrast to the completely straight words of the author (not to imply Keats didn't empathize with his speaker, but that his presence in the poem is very structural). The Urn is blue because it is a "cold pastoral; blue represents a lack of exuberant emotions, and a still remove from communication. However, the script is in an orange cursive because, just as cursive is a stylized form of writing, the urn is a highly stylized piece of art--especially in its images. The reader is yellow because its the lightest color on the graph and signifies how the reader's role is less intrusive, but more observational.

In terms of interactions between the spheres, there is more mergance between the speaker and the Urn because they have a more direct interaction in the poem. This interaction is represented by the yellow-red pulsating line on the border of the two spheres. This line follows the course of the two sphere's interaction by moving from a disunited point to one of fusion. However, this fusion occurs away from the speaker because it is not something which the reader is necessarily a part of. In contrast, the mergance of the reader and the speaker's spheres focuses on the words "ours and "us; the reader is invited to become a part of the experience of the poem, but can choose not to enter that fusion of emotions; therefore, there is one line of the pulsating line close to the reader's sphere, which show the ability of the speaker to access the empathy of the speaker.

The zig-zag lines at the mergance of the three spheres represents how my argument disrupts the reception of the Ode because the poem wants to submerge the simultaneous address and contrasting uses of the urn, in the dialogue between the speaker and the Urn. Additionally, the structure of the author for the poem is represented at the mergance of the author and reader's sphere because these aspects of the poem are more for the reader, in order to make the philosophy in the poem easier to understand. In conclusion, this diagram is not done by a computer, but by hand in order to show the emotional involvement of its creator in the text, just as the Greeks placed emotions in their hand-crafted urns and Keats, in his hand-penned manuscript.