After giving a lively picture of a stationary urn in a gradual and smooth-going way, the poet triggers the readers' thinking by the last two lines. By the metaphysical phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty", the poem invites the readers to search for a certain kind of beauty, the ultimate truth, on earth or somewhere else. The urn, in other words, begins by quoting Sir Joshua (for Keats and his readers, the world's greatest authority on art of all kinds), implicitly affirms the sufficiency of human intellect, explicitly affirms the equation of beauty and truth, and pronounces this knowledge entirely sufficient to create the elegant geometry of such superb art as the urn.
Because of the uniformity of human minds and passions, moreover, the figures inscribed on the urn (which puzzle the observer at first glance) become intelligible as we relate them to our own experience. The first stanza of the poem is filled with questions; the last, with none. Being art, the urn retains its ability to "speak" to all who observe it, reminding us of our paradoxical dilemma as mortals who exist in finite time.
The urn's characters are frozen in time. The lovers will always love, though they will never consummate their desire. The musicians will always play beneath trees that will never lose their leaves.
The speaker admires this state of existence, but in the end it leaves his "heart high-sorrowful." This is because the urn, while beautiful and seemingly eternal, is not life.
The problem with Keats's Beauty and Truth statement arises out of the reader's inability to distinguish between the poet, his reflections on the urn, and any possible statement made by the urn. He concludes that Keats fails to provide his poet with enough characterization to be able to speak for the urn, a flaw that he considers to be corrected by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes[29].Bennetts idea is that "the audience is always already figured by narrative, then the intrusion of the 'otherness' of narrative into the self-identical lyric form of the ode necessarily produces an audience-effect" [31].
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You have some good sources here. I especially like the one about how the figures on the urn become more intelligible as we relate them to to our own experience. This is Exactly what Keats was doing. He was relating the images on the urn to what he knew was true of the world. For example, he noticed that there were people walking with a cow and wearing garland and assumes they are going to make a sacrifice. He makes that assumption because in reality, if he were to see people traveling in this manner, it would be safe to assume they are going to a funeral.
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