"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a short poem, one of Keats`s great odes. The urn described in this poem is of marble, and we may infer that the scenes on it are carved in relief. These scenes are two and separate. The one described in the first three stanzas is of "mad pursuit," in which a youth pipes under a tree while another youth pursues a maiden. The other scene is of a sacrificial procession, in which a priest leads a garlanded heifer to a "green altar" and is followed by a company of pious worshippers. But no matter how critics and scholars have described the urn, it is a funeral urn which contains the ashes of the dead, of a civilization that is past. Up to the present, critics and scholars have studied this poem on a basis of the meaning of the last two lines and how they should be interpreted. T. S. Eliot, for example, regarded them as a blemish. This kind of approach does not seem to be a useful interpretation, because Eliot does not consider the historical and ideological context of the poem as New Critics do and the urn`s concluding remarks about `beauty` and `truth` might appear to be apt and interchangeable, furthermore the idea of beauty and truth is related to the oppressive political conditions of Keats`s day. I treat "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in relation to the imagination and historical consciousness. In Keats`s early poetry, his imagination has an aesthetic tendency, later tends to be not only sympathetic imagination, but also political and historical consciousness as expressions of desire for human and society betterment. Despite this poem`s expressed and laudable desire to find sexuality and beauty behind the turmoil and mutability of everyday life, it betrays ideologically a form of oppression that Keats and his age never escaped, even when they situated themselves knowingly and firmly against political and ideological tyranny. In other words, the desire of sexuality in the first three stanzas and the love of beauty and truth in the last two lines are the keys to understanding the historical dimension of "Ode on a Grecian Urn", because they display that utopian longing with which emerge from within a context of historical contradiction and hardship in his day. In conclusion, this poem demonstrates the powers of Keats`s sympathetic imagination and historical consciousness.