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“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Introduction
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Tim Turnbull's "Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn" first appeared in his 2009 collection Caligula on Ice and Other Poems. Parodying John Keats's famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn," this poem's speaker casts an amused eye over a vase by contemporary British artist Grayson Perry, its sides decorated with images of rowdy kids making a ruckus in the street at night. This artwork, the speaker suggests, preserves and celebrates a part of British working-class culture that might just form the basis of a pearl-clutching newspaper "exposé" in its own time. Art immortalizes fleeting moments, this poem suggests, and it also transforms and perhaps glorifies the everyday.
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“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Summary
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The speaker addresses a garish vase by the artist Grayson Perry (who, the speaker observes, should have been Shirley Temple in another life). The vase shows images of working-class kids from housing estates making a ruckus late at night, wearing Burberry clothes and revving their cars up and down the highways of England. The vase's image of these kids, the speaker observes, accurately captures this scene without making it seem dangerous or troubling (as the same scene might feel if you read about it in the tabloids).
The vase's image calls up the fun and joy of the kids' lives: the roar of their cars' engines, the pulse of their music. But it also creates a strangely peaceful mood. Though the painted tires squeal and the painted girls shout (a little too young to understand that they're in danger), nothing bad will ever happen on the side of this vase. The cars will never crash, and the kids will never be hurt.
Instead, they'll stay up late eternally, forever charged up with their youth and with ecstasy (both the drug and the feeling), relishing their cars, the thumping basslines of their music, and their own cockiness. They'll forever speed down backroads and highways, and they'll never have to worry about getting up for work the next morning. Every girl will be eternally gorgeous, every guy eternally muscular, and all of them will be forever pumped full of sexual energy that will never drain away (and which will never lead to them ending up with a sexually transmitted disease).
Now the vase shows more kids standing on the sidelines, toasting the drivers with cheap booze: sneaky boys and bubbly girls with their hair braided in corn rows, all cheering the drivers on to leave tire burns on the road or to do donuts, leaving their mark in the middle of lifeless suburban streets. Around them, dogs start barking at the ruckus and neighbors peek through their curtains; retirees and parents call the cops, begging them to do something about the noise. But peace and quiet are for rich people.
And so (the speaker tells the vase), thousands of years from now, when no one understands the images on your side, when our art galleries are all flattened and we're all long dead, future poets will look at you and dream about how young people lived back in your day. Their lives will look joyous and free. In a world that feels just a little darker and colder than ours, those future poets will say, How happy those young people used to be—kids who knew that the truth was a matter of arguable opinion, and beauty was in the eye of the beholder.
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“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Themes
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The Power of Art
“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” parodies John Keats’s famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Like that earlier poem, this one muses on art’s power to preserve fleeting moments for eternity. But this poem also makes the tongue-in-cheek point that art doesn’t just preserve such moments: it also idealizes them, transforming what might look crass to contemporary eyes into something that the poets of the future might see as a romantic dream.
Rather than gazing at an elegant Grecian urn, this poem’s speaker admires a vase by the contemporary artist Grayson Perry. This vase is decorated not with images of graceful young lovers and hushed religious processions (as Keats’s urn is), but with “tales of kids in cars / On crap estates”—visions of British working-class youth culture in housing projects at the beginning of the 21st century. The scene here, the speaker observes, is the sort of thing that might inspire a scandalized “Daily Express exposé” (a sensationalistic article in a right-wing tabloid newspaper): these kids drink and drive, do donuts in the road in the small hours, and risk infections every time they have sex with each other.
But captured on the side of the vase, this slightly sordid scene feels transformed. The vase celebrates all the kids’ exuberant energy, joyous “arrogance,” and freedom—and it leaves out the sorrow and danger, the threat of car crash and the pressure of poverty. Where Keats celebrates his urn’s power to preserve beautiful moments (like the second just before lovers kiss) eternally, this poem’s speaker gets excited about the idea that art can also elevate and glorify the everyday. There’s something comical about the speaker’s idea that “future poets” from “millennia hence,” who won’t have the context for the vase that contemporary observers do, will sigh over how lucky kids back then were to live such wild, free lives. But there’s something joyful about that idea, too.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-50
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British Culture and Class
“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” quietly laughs at (and shakes its head over) the deep-rooted British class system. By observing the way that so-called low culture transforms into high culture over time, the poem suggests that there’s something pretty silly about the whole idea of dividing a society into low and high at all.
The world depicted on the Grayson Perry vase is the world of the British working class at the beginning of the 21st century. The teenage “louts” who party on the side of this vase live on the lower rungs of British society: they grow up on “crap estates” (cruddy housing projects), play "chlamydia roulette" every time they sleep with each other, and end up the subject of scandalized “Daily Express exposés" about juvenile delinquency. Around them, a respectable middle-class world of “dead suburban streets” looks on in outrage; as these kids do drunken donuts in the street at midnight, their better-off, curtain-twitching neighbors call the cops on them. Britain, the poem observes, is shaped by deep class divisions.
The speaker—who’s admiring art pottery in a gallery and parodying John Keats—comes across as a member of the erudite, educated British middle class. But their sympathy is clearly with the kids in the street, who express wild joy in spite of their rough lives and blow raspberries at suburban conformity. The speaker doesn’t just value these kids’ energy, they realize that the cultural divisions that separate them from their neighbors are just plain silly. “Millennia hence,” the speaker notes, the signs of class that Perry records on his vase (like the fashions the kids wear and the cars they drive) won’t mean a thing. Instead, only a record of the kids’ liveliness and youthful exuberance will endure.
For that matter, divisions between “high” and “low” art are pretty silly and meaningless, too! By parodying John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” here, the speaker might subtly ask readers to consider the fact that Keats, now celebrated as one of the greatest English poets, was seen as anything but respectable in his day: snobbish contemporary critics derided him as a “Cockney poet” who should stick to his humble day job. Similarly, the “garish,” “kitchy” Perry urn might one day seem like the loftiest of artworks. Class and status, here, are very much in the eye of the beholder.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 3-7
- Line 10
- Lines 11-40
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Art, Time, and Interpretation
By comparing a contemporary speaker’s understanding of a pot by the artist Grayson Perry with the way that future observers might see the same artwork, this poem makes the point that time has a huge effect on the way people interpret art. In contrast with the poem it parodies (Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which celebrates art’s power to capture and immortalize fleeting moments), this poem suggests that art doesn’t just outwit time; time also changes art.
“Future poets” who stand in front of this “gaudy” Grayson Perry vase, the speaker observes, simply won’t see it in the same way that contemporary observers do. A person from Perry’s own era (like the speaker) will know that the scenes the vase depicts—rowdy kids making a ruckus with their cars late at night—is laden with information about the British class system (and leaves out a lot of the less happy details of its subjects’ lives). But “millennia hence,” when “all context is lost,” the starry-eyed poets who look at this vase will only see the kids’ glee, and not fully understand the world the artwork came from. They’ll envy those “happy […] creatures” who lived such carefree lives, and they’ll especially envy what will strike them as the kids’ understanding that “the truth [is] all negotiable / and beauty in the gift of the beholder.”
Those words—a parody of Keats’s famous “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—neatly states this poem’s own point about art. To a contemporary viewer, Perry’s urn looks “kitchy” and “garish,” funny because it glorifies the same kinds of scenes you might read about in a shocked “Daily Express exposé” on juvenile delinquents. But, given enough time, that “truth” will be fully “negotiable,” if not lost altogether.
Art doesn’t exactly endure changelessly down the centuries, then. Though it might indeed endure, its meaning will also change with time; its “truth,” to this poem’s speaker, is always “negotiable.” (Turnbull subtly points out that this is a matter of class distinctions, too: time might elevate what now looks like a “garish crock” into high, sublime art, just as it has elevated the works of John Keats—derided in his time as a low-class “Cockney poet”—to an honored place in English literary history.)
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 41-50
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The Thrill of Youth
Youth, in “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn,” is a charmed and glorious time of freedom—or it can feel like one, anyway. Gazing at a Grayson Perry vase that depicts drunk teenagers loudly enjoying themselves in the street at night, this poem’s speaker admires their sheer moxie, energy, and joy. The kids on the vase are in the prime of their lives: “each girl is buff, each geezer toned and strong,” the speaker observes, and they’re “charged” with exuberant sexual energy. In real life, the speaker seems to be more likely to "plead for quiet" than to join in with the kids. But when they see teenage life depicted on a vase, they can't help but appreciate the kids' devil-may-care youth.
Part of what’s so strangely moving about the images on this “garish,” “kitschy” vase is that they capture what it feels like to be a wild teenager while leaving out all the complications an adult might worry about (like jobs, illness, and car crashes). In its depiction of consequence-free exuberant teenagers frozen in time, the vase makes the point that being a teenager can feel like being immortally young, beautiful, and carefree—even if, sadly, that charmed state can’t actually last forever.
Youth might not really be eternal, but the alluring idea of youth is evergreen. When “future poets” look at this vase, the speaker imagines, they won’t understand a fraction of the culture depicted there. But they’ll understand the idea of youth, all right, and they’ll wistfully sigh, “How happy were those creatures then,” nostalgic for an idealized past, but also for the thrilling illusions of youth itself.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 3-7
- Lines 16-30
- Lines 31-50
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn”
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Lines 1-2
Hello! What's all ...
... has knocked out“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” begins with a complex and cheeky knot of allusions. Most obviously, this poem parodies the English Romantic poet John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the poem that ends with the famous lines, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty; that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” In that poem, a speaker marvels at an ancient Greek vase, considering the way its scenes preserve beautiful moments by freezing them eternally (for instance, capturing the second of blissful anticipation right before a kiss).
This poem’s speaker is looking at a different kind of vase: a pot by the contemporary British artist Grayson Perry. Known for his witty, playful art, Perry is most famous for his pottery, upon which he often paints scenes from modern British life. He’s also known as a flamboyant fashion icon who wears a lot of bright, girlish clothing. (That’s what the speaker means when they refer to him as a “Shirley Temple manqué”—that is, a would-be Shirley Temple, a guy who in another life should have been the embodiment of cutesy femininity.) Right from the beginning, readers can tell they’re in the hands of a witty, observant speaker: even the pun between “Grayson” and “Grecian” suggests a joker.
The speaker starts by addressing a Grayson Perry pot in casual language: “Hello! What’s all this here?” Right from the start, then, the poem is in a tonal world far from Keats’s hushed, awestruck speaker (who starts their poem by reverently addressing the urn as the “still unravish’d bride of quietness”). Where Keats meditated on an urn, this speaker accosts a "kitschy" (or garish, sentimental) "vase"
At first, the speaker doesn’t seem to think much of this vase, either, imagining that Grayson Perry, a guy who’d really rather be Shirley Temple, just “knocked [it] out” one bored afternoon. But, like Keats, this poem’s speaker will end up reflecting on what this vase has to tell its observers about pleasure, permanence, and the power of art.
Tongue firmly in cheek, Tim Turnbull borrows Keats’s form for this poem. Like Keats’s ode, this one is written in five 10-line stanzas of iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “will fu- | ture po- | ets look | on you | amazed”). Appropriating the shape of one of the most famous poems in the English language, Turnbull invites readers to think about artistic influence and endurance even as he jokes about Perry’s “kitschy vase.”
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Lines 3-10
delineating tales of ...
... Daily Express exposé,
Unlock all 476 words of this analysis of Lines 3-10 of “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.
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Lines 11-20
can bring to ...
... befall these children. -
Lines 20-30
They will stay ...
... of chlamydia roulette. -
Lines 31-40
Now see who ...
... for the rich. -
Lines 41-46
And so, millennia ...
... free and bountiful -
Lines 47-50
and there, beneath ...
... .
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“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Symbols
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The Grayson Perry Vase
Like the Grecian urn that inspired this poem, the "kitschy vase" the speaker describes symbolizes art itself. Capturing (and elevating) scenes from life, art has the power to immortalize what might otherwise be fleeting: a night of gleefully irresponsible teenage driving, for instance. But it can also transform the very scenes it preserves.
Looking on Grayson Perry's vase, which is decorated with images of working-class British kids having fun, the speaker realizes that these images will look very different to people in generations to come, who won't have the same cultural context for it that modern-day observers do. What people now might see as a slightly seedy or dangerous scene (albeit a pretty fun one, too) will, to the people of the future, just look romantic.
The vase, then, doesn't just preserve a moment, but it also changes that moment, putting an idyllic gloss over what might otherwise just seem ordinary. This, the poem suggests, is what art can do more generally. While Keats's poem focuses on art's power to hold beautiful moments in place eternally, Turnbull's is interested in the way art might glorify moments that might otherwise look "garish" and crude.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2: “A kitschy vase / some Shirley Temple manqué has knocked out”
- Lines 41-46: “And so, millennia hence, you garish crock, / when all context is lost, galleries razed / to level dust and we're long in the box, / will future poets look on you amazed, / speculate how children might have lived when / you were fired, lives so free and bountiful”
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“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Allusion
This parody comes to life through layers of allusions. Most obviously, the poem alludes throughout to the work of two artists: the contemporary potter Grayson Perry and the 19th-century Romantic poet John Keats.
A Perry vase, decorated with images of kids from a British housing estate revving their cars late at night, is this ode's addressee. Perry is famous for his witty, irreverent, brightly colored pottery (as well as his flamboyant fashion, which the speaker refers to by calling him a “Shirley Temple manqué,” a would-be Shirley Temple).
By using a loud, “kitschy” Perry vase in place of Keats’s elegant, ancient Grecian urn, Turnbull establishes the poem’s tongue-in-cheek tone and raises questions about taste, class, and culture. The very same piece of pottery that looks like a “garish crock” to contemporary eyes, the poem suggests, might later be seen as something as lofty and sublime as Keats’s urn is.
Meanwhile, Keats’s great “Ode on a Grecian Urn” gives the poem its shape. Following the older poem’s meter, rhyme scheme, and stanza form, Turnbull makes a step-by-step progress through Keats’s ode, parodying it at every turn: Keats’s young lovers become Turnbull’s teenagers playing “crude games of chlamydia roulette,” and Keats’s sacred procession leading a cow to the sacrifice becomes Turnbull’s parade of “rat-boys and cornrowed cheerleaders” glugging from bottles of cheap booze.
Turnbull borrows specific language from the poem, too: Keats’s cry “More happy love! More happy, happy love!” inflects the speaker’s sigh, “How happy were those creatures then,” and the poem’s famous conclusion—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”—is here transformed into this tongue-in-cheek tribute to subjectivity:
[…] the truth was all negotiable
and beauty in the gift of the beholder.By responding so directly to Keats’s poem, Turnbull both pays homage to it and questions it, suggesting that art is just as changeable as it is enduring.
Smaller allusions plant the poem in the time and place it was written: Britain in the early 2000s. Turnbull’s references to fashions like “Calvin’s” (Calvin Klein underwear), “thong[s],” “cornrow[s],” and “Burberry,” alongside references to “house” and “garage” music, give this poem a very particular atmosphere, dateable within a few years. The meaning of details like this, the poem points out, inevitably fade away over time. “Millennia hence,” people looking at this vase won’t know that a taste for Burberry clothes marks the kids on the vase as working-class fashionistas; they’ll just see their joyful youth.
Where allusion appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2: “A kitschy vase / some Shirley Temple manqué has knocked out”
- Lines 3-4: “kids in cars / on crap estates, the Burberry clad louts”
- Line 10: “a Daily Express exposé”
- Lines 13-14: “the joyful throb of UK garage or / of house imported from the continent”
- Line 28: “every pair of Calvin’s and each thong”
- Line 32: “Buckfast and Diamond White”
- Line 33: “rat-boys and corn-rowed cheerleaders”
- Lines 48-50: “How happy were those creatures then, / who knew the truth was all negotiable / and beauty in the gift of the beholder / .”
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Apostrophe
Unlock all 230 words of this analysis of Apostrophe in “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
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Imagery
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Enjambment
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Colloquialism
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Irony
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“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Kitschy
- Shirley Temple manqué
- Knocked out
- Delineating
- Estates
- Burberry
- Louts
- Bedlam
- Gaudy
- Evocation
- Inducing
- Daily Express
- Garage, House
- The continent
- Educe
- Gyratory
- Buff
- Geezer
- Each pair of Calvin's
- Chlamydia
- The sparse grass verge
- Buckfast and Diamond White
- Tarmac
- Row
- Pensioners
- Garish crock
- Razed
Kitschy-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “A kitschy vase”)
In gleefully bad taste.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn”
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Form
Parodying John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” borrows the earlier poem’s form:
- Like Keats, Turnbull is writing an ode, a poem in tribute to a particular subject (say, a nightingale, a mood, or a wind).
- Like Keats, Turnbull is using ekphrasis here—that is, describing a work of art in a work of art.
- Like Keats, Turnbull divides the poem's 50 lines into five 10-line stanzas.
- And like Keats, Turnbull writes in iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “who knew | the truth | was all | nego- | tiable”) and uses a melodious rhyme scheme. (This rhyme scheme also breaks each stanza into a quatrain and a setset.)
Sticking pretty closely to Keats’s shape, Turnbull diverges in tone. While this poem riffs on one of the same idea that Keats’s poem explores—that art has the power to immortalize otherwise fleeting moments and moods—it also cheekily suggests that art has the power to elevate the scenes and people it immortalizes, perhaps making them seem safer, lovelier, and more innocent than real life ever was. Where Keats’s imagined urn romantically depicts lovers always on the verge of kissing and a solemn religious procession on its way toward a ritual sacrifice, Grayson Perry’s vase captures working-class kids doing donuts in quiet suburban streets—and, as Turnbull notes, leaves out the perils of these kids’ lives, from sexually transmitted infections to car crashes.
In parodying Keats, Turnbull might also be quietly making the point that British class divisions and ideas of high and low culture are a lot messier than some might be inclined to think. While a contemporary reader likely sees Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as the loftiest of artworks, Keats himself was a middle-class Cockney kid, derided by snobbish critics in his day as a guy who should leave poetry to the gentry and go back to his humble day job as a doctor (a fairly low-status profession in the 19th century).
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Meter
Like the Keats ode that it parodies, “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” is written in iambic pentameter. That means that its lines each use five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in “can bring | to mind | the throat- | y tur- | bo roar” (line 11). This is a familiar, recognizable meter that immediately associates the poem with the respected poets of centuries past.
However, the poem’s speaker varies that meter quite a bit, giving this stately rhythm a cheeky, playful tone. For instance, listen to the variation in the first line:
Hello! | What's all | this here? | A kitsch- | y vase
The first words of the poem form three emphatic trochees (the opposite foot of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm). Turnbull’s speaker thus begins with a tongue-in-cheek interrogation, stopping the urn as if it looked like it were up to no good.
There are plenty of other variations on the meter throughout the poem, which, along with its many colloquialisms, keep things feeling light-hearted, loose, and approachable even as it nods to a very literary form and history.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem’s rhyme scheme runs like this in each stanza:
ABABCDEDCE
For the first stanza, the rhymes are as follows:
[...] vase A
[...] out B
[...] cars A
[...] louts B
[...] night C
[...] Slough, D
[...] highway. E
[...] somehow, D
[...] fright, C
[...] exposé, EThis is a very musical pattern that Turnbull borrows from the first stanza of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (the poem that Turnbull is parodying throughout). While Keats goes on to vary his ode’s rhyme scheme slightly (mixing up the C, D, and E rhymes), Turnbull sticks to the same pattern all the way through; this is a simpler rhyme scheme for a jokier poem. Still, the poem's light-hearted language contrasts with its intricate form. This reflects the idea that art can elevate life while also poking fun at the self-seriousness way in which art idealizes reality.
This rhyme scheme also captures Turnbull's accent. The rhyme between "vase" and "cars," for instance, plants this poem squarely in the UK.
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“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Speaker
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The poem’s speaker is a contemporary Brit whose tone is equal parts erudite and down-to-earth. An observer of the art world, conversant with the work of potter and personality Grayson Perry, the speaker is also at ease with casual, slangy language. One moment they’re dryly calling Perry a “Shirley Temple manqué” (that is, a would-be Shirley Temple, an allusion to Perry’s flamboyant, candy-colored fashion), the next they’re calling the guys depicted on the vase “geezer[s]” (the British equivalent of “dudes” or “bros,” roughly) and talking familiarly about “garage” and “house” music. This is an educated, middle-class speaker who keeps an eye on all of Britain, from its literary past (as witnessed in the very form of this poem, a parody of English Romantic poet John Keats) to its modern pop culture to its persistent class divisions.
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“Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Setting
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There are layers of settings in "Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn." The poem broadly takes place in contemporary Britain, where (readers can imagine) the speaker stands looking at a Grayson Perry vase in a gallery. But the speaker also ventures into the imagined version of contemporary Britain that the artist Grayson Perry has painted onto the side of a vase.
In looking at the vase, the speaker almost wistfully observes that its cheeky depiction of British teenagers making a ruckus presents these kids’ lives as charming, freewheeling, and funny—and leaves out the danger and suffering. This “gaudy evocation” of young working-class people, the speaker notes, captures the same world as would a shocked “Daily Express exposé” (that is, an article in a sensationalistic right-wing British tabloid). But on the side of a vase, these visions don’t feel frightening or worrying; they just feel joyful, full of the energy and confidence of youth.
In real life, the speaker knows, the kinds of kids this vase depicts face all kinds of troubles, from growing up impoverished in “crap estate[s]” (awful housing projects) to catching STIs. The world the vase depicts thus glosses over a lot of uncomfortable truths about modern Britain. But it also glorifies and celebrates the young people’s joy and freedom, capturing something important about them that the news does not.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn”
Literary Context
Tim Turnbull is a contemporary British writer, performer, and visual artist. Born in the north of England, Turnbull moved to Scotland as a young man and has since become a popular public figure, leading community poetry readings and workshops. He first published this poem in his 2009 collection Caligula on Ice and Other Poems.
This poem shows one literary influence in particular: "Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn" is an attentive parody of John Keats's famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and draws on the great Romantic poet's style as well as his themes. Turnbull uses the ode form—in which a speaker addresses (and often celebrates) a particular subject, like a goddess, a breeze, or a terrible mood—to respond to Keats's idea that art is an everlasting "friend to man." Where Keats's ode suggests that art freezes time and offers eternal consolation to suffering humanity, Turnbull's adds that art also changes what it depicts—and that time changes art, too!
Turnbull's witty, tongue-in-cheek poetry also allies him with fellow contemporary British writers like Carol Ann Duffy, who likewise draws on (and satirizes) artistic and literary history.
Historical Context
"Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn" is rooted in a very specific time and place. The fashions ("Burberry," "corn-row[s]") and music ("garage," "house") the speaker mentions ground the poem in Britain during the first decades of the 2000s.
The early 2000s saw a global recession; for a lot of people, work was hard to find, and money was tight. The devil-may-care kids this poem's speaker describes respond to poverty with defiance and glee. The curtain-twitching middle-class world they invade doesn't approve. This was the era of the ASBO (or Anti-Social Behaviour Order), a kind of warning against common public misbehaviors like drunkenness and peeing in places one shouldn't. Introduced by Prime Minister Tony Blair's government in 1998, ASBOs were often directed at juvenile delinquents and became a symbol of a culture in which the older generations just didn't know what to do with the young. Until they were abolished in 2014, ASBOs became almost a badge of pride for the rebellious kids who earned them.
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More “Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn” Resources
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External Resources
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Turnbull's Website — Visit Turnbull's website to learn more about his work.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to Turnbull performing the poem.
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Turnbull's life.
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The Poem in its Time — Read an article about this poem's place in the British curriculum.
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Ode on a Grecian Urn — Read the great poem that Turnbull parodies here.
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Grayson Perry's Urns — See images of some of Grayson Perry's artwork.
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