Hopkins explores the meaning of Keats's reference to the Grecian urn as "a friend to man" in the final stanza of the poem. He views the urn in the poem from three progressive perspectives: "an ideal object," an "object of the speaker's destructive impulses," and a "friend." This material is related to Winnicott's work on the "fate" of transitional objects, which gradually become decathected and may undergo fantasied destruction. The author gives evidence that the "destruction" following decathexis described by Winnicott is replaced, in the poem, by a process of disillusionment, which permits space for reconciliation. Hopkins points to the ironic element in Keats's reference to the urn as a "friend," since the urn becomes the object of unconscious destructive motives and simultaneously becomes a real object, of cultural value, rather than a fantasied projection.