cribing a scene painted on the side of a Grecian urn. He sees on the side of this urn images of life--people reveling, dancing in the woods, singing, playing music, and so on. The entire image is of a moment frozen in time, a joyous moment in which people are laughing and cavorting and now will be doing so forever because of the way the scene has been captured forever by a long-ago artist.
The scene for the poem is therefore wherever the poet has encountered this urn, an the poet is now responding to the images he sees on the urn, to the ideas that the scene brings to his mind, and to the way he feels about those ideas. The audience is the reader, who hears the scene described and who is then treated to the idea evoked in the mind of the poet by this scene and by the way the scene has been frozen in time.
The poet's argument is simply that the artist has given these people and their actions immortality. In a broader sense, Keats is speaking of the power of art to transform beauty into a larger truth and to give it the power to transcend time. The artist in this case was from ancient Greece and has saved this scene forever by placing it on the side of the urn. Keats is similarly preserving his observations of the urn and its meaning by placing those thoughts in the form of this poem. The artist always transcends time in this way and speaks to subsequent generations as well as to his or her own. Keats observes this with a certain sadness as well, for in this world all is mortal, while in the world of the urn life is immortal. The scene on the urn will exist after Keats and the reader are long gone, and this is true no matter when the reader picks up the poem, just as the poem itself will outlast poet and reader alike.
Keats grabs the attention of the reader with the first line of the poem, a line embodying many of the responses and themes of the poem: "Thou still unravished bride of quietness." This line refers to o...