The "Ode on Indolence"—a hymn to laziness and passivity—begins, fittingly enough, with a dreamy scene. The speaker wakes up one morning to see "three figures" walking past him. Appearing in profile, holding hands, dressed in "placid sandals" and "white robes," they seem to have stepped right off a "marble Urn," an ancient Greek vase.
They move like they're on an urn, too—or, more precisely, as if they're on an urn that's being slowly rotated, so the figures on it move past, disappear, then reappear as their side of the urn comes round again. Take a look at the way the speaker describes their motion:
They pass'd, like figures on a marble Urn,
When shifted round to see the other side;
They came again; as when the Urn once more
Is shifted round, the first seen Shades return;
The repetitive language here evokes the dreamy, steady circling of the imagined urn as the figures pass before the speaker's eyes once and again. The figures' inexorable return—and the fact that the speaker refers to the figures as "Shades," ghosts—make this vision feel haunting. These shades, no matter how "serene" and peaceful they look, seem to have ghost-like business with the speaker.
Still barely awake, the speaker doesn't even do anything so active as see the figures: rather, he says that "one morn before me were three figures seen," as if someone else might almost have been doing the seeing. And as the figures pass him by once and again, they seem "strange to [him]," unfamiliar—an unfamiliarity he justifies by saying he's well-versed in "Phidian lore," not in vases. The "Phidian lore" the speaker alludes to is a knowledge of ancient Greek sculpture: Phidias was the legendary sculptor to whom the Parthenon Marbles were attributed.
The speaker thus seems to say: What do you want from me, urn-figures? I can't identify you, I'm no expert, I know more about Greek statuary than I do about vase-people like you.
Next to the speaker's precise image of a Greek urn being spun around for examination—and the substantial knowledge of Greek art implied by the very words "Phidian lore"—this sounds like a weak excuse, a kind of 19th-century "new phone, who dis?" The speaker does sort of recognize these figures. He just doesn't want to. These shades want something from him, and he'd rather stay in bed.
The fact that these shades appear "like figures on a marble Urn" gives some hint at what exactly they might want. Keats, fascinated by ancient Greece, often used its enduring artworks as a way to explore the powers, mysteries, and limits of art itself. If three Grecian urn-figures are haunting this very Keatsian speaker, they probably have something to do with his artistic destiny.
The poem's epigraph ("They toil not, neither do they spin") thus feels like the speaker's preemptive argument against the shades' creative demands. Those words come from no lesser authority than Christ: they're a quotation from the parable of the lilies, a story Jesus tells in the biblical Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In this story, Jesus tells his followers not to worry or strive, but to learn from the "lilies of the field," which don't do a lick of work but are still dressed more beautifully than King Solomon himself. Such lily-like indolence, this poem will argue, is both delicious and mysteriously creative.