Ode on a Grayson Perry Urn Flashcards
1
Q
The Power of Art
A
- “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.
- 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.
2
Q
British Culture and Class
A
- “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 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.
3
Q
Art, Time, and Interpretation
A
- 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.
- 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.)
3
Q
The Thrill of Youth
A
- 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.
4
Q
They will stay …
… of chlamydia roulette.
A
- The speaker’s almost parental concern for the kids on the vase here slides into something more celebratory. “[P]umped on youth and ecstasy,” the speaker says, full of the “pulsing juice” of youthful lust, the kids depicted here will live forever at the height of their teenage “arrogance”—and they’ll never have to “race back home, for work next day, to bed.” The imaginary young lives depicted here are free not just of the pressures of time (like the lovers on Keats’s urn are) but of danger and responsibility. In other words, the vase captures how they might feel for a few sweet fleeting moments while they’re out screeching up and down the roads—but liberates them from the harsher realities of their lives.
- The poem’s tone here takes a turn into wryness. While Keats sighs to the young lover on his urn, “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” the speaker of this poem adopts the slang of the kids on the vase in their celebration: “Each girl is buff, each geezer toned and strong.” (Readers from outside the UK, take note: a “geezer” is something like a “dude” or a “bro” in British slang, not an old man.) This colloquial language also captures something about these kids’ lives; alongside the speaker, readers can hear voices coming out of this vase as well as admiring all those fit young girls and geezers.
4
Q
Hello! What’s all …
… has knocked out
A
- “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.
5
Q
delineating tales of …
… Daily Express exposé,
A
- Readers might now begin to think about where the speaker might stand in relation to the different social spheres they’ve evoked here. They’re a person standing in front of a work of contemporary art in a gallery, parodying John Keats in iambic pentameter, subtly deriding the Daily Express, combining a mildly elevated vocabulary (“delineating,” “gaudy,” “manqué”) with an earthier one (“crap,” “Hello! What’s all this here?”)—all signs that mark them as an educated member of the British middle class. When they observe that the vase can “conjure the scene without inducing fright,” they also subtly admit that they might be one of the people expected to feel fright at the spectacle of working-class kids raising an uproar in a “crap estate.”
- Contemplating the vase, the speaker begins to move into its world. On its sides, the speaker observes, are painted “tales of kids in cars / on crap estates.” In other words, the vase depicts the lives of teenagers growing up in some of Britain’s rougher public housing projects. The kids Perry depicts live in gleeful chaos, “flail[ing] their motors through the smoky night” and “creating bedlam on the Queen’s highway,” raising a cheeky, irreverent ruckus with their noisy cars.
6
Q
can bring to …
… befall these children.
A
- Looking at the vase, the speaker gets more and more deeply involved with the world it depicts. Grayson Perry’s images of those “kids in cars,” the speaker says, conjures up “joyful” noise: the “throaty turbo roar” of revving cars, the “throb of UK garage” and “house” music, the “nervous squeals / of girls” relishing the adrenaline rush of dangerous driving.
- All this sound imagery is a witty allusion to the Keats ode this poem parodies, in which the speaker looks at a painted piper on the side of that Grecian urn and reflects, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter […].” In other words, a beautiful image of a piper can make its observers imagine a song lovely beyond any real song that was ever heard. Visual art plays on the imagination, and that gives it an otherworldly power.
- Something similar is happening on the side of the Grayson Perry vase: the vase welcomes its observers into the kids’ sheer energy and joy, inviting sympathetic enjoyment. But here, art also transforms what might (in real life) seem dangerous (and earsplittingly loud) into something that can almost miraculously inspire “a sense of peace, of calm.”
- The kids on the Grayson Perry vase are immortal this way, too. But the speaker’s feelings about this seem more tender and parental than the Keats speaker’s feelings are about those lovers. This poem’s speaker calls the kids on the vase “children” and feels calm at the thought that they can’t be hurt, not just that they won’t have to stop kissing and grow old one day. Though the speaker acknowledges that, in the real-life version of this scene, they might be more likely to be peering irritatedly through their curtains at the ruckus than taking part in it, they love the opportunity the vase gives them to enjoy the kids’ sheer moxie, relieved of the burden of worry about “these children.”
7
Q
Now see who …
… for the rich.
A
- Following right along with Keats’s ode, the poem now introduces a new set of characters. In Keats, the speaker looks away from the lovers and pipers to see a sacred procession coming along: a young cow is being led “to the sacrifice,” attended by the whole population of a little painted village. Here, the “kids in cars” are joined by—well, even more kids, a crew of scrawny “rat-boys” and “corn-rowed cheerleaders” in a celebratory mood. (Those “rat-boys” are an allusion to a notable delinquent, a kid who began a career of burglary at age 11 and earned the name “Rat Boy” because police found him hiding in a wall.)
- Here, class comes into the forefront again. As the kids make a commotion, suburban “curtains twitch” as the respectable middle-class sorts—“pensioners and parents,” retirees and people trying to get their kids to bed—begin to call the cops on them. But, as the speaker wryly points out, real “tranquility […] is for the rich.” Again, this is a moment that might feel tense or fraught in real life. On the side of the vase, it’s just funny. The jaunty /p/ alliteration of “pensioners,” “parents,” “plead,” and “peace” underscores the mood here: as depicted by Perry, a tale of class tensions and police involvement becomes a caricatured celebration of youthful cheekiness.
8
Q
And so, millennia …
… free and bountiful
A
- As the final stanza begins, readers familiar with Keats’s ode might be bracing themselves to see where the speaker goes with this parody. The last stanza of Keats’s poem contains some of the most famous lines in English poetry, a grand crescendo that describes art’s endurance across the centuries and its ability to be a consoling “friend to man,” culminating in the now-proverbial (and endlessly argued-over) words: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Where Keats’s poem is awestruck, however, this one is irreverent—so where will the speaker go?
- Where Keats celebrates art’s power to preserve a consoling, enlightening vision of beauty across time, then, Turnbull here observes that art doesn’t just preserve moments of life. It also transforms and elevates them. The same point could be made about the figures on Keats’s urn, if one wanted to: even the most gorgeous pair of young lovers in the world might, in real life, have something stuck in their teeth, and that flower-garlanded cow with the “silken flanks” might drop a cowpat on her way to the sacrifice.
- This moment also wryly suggests that what counts as romantic or “high culture” is all relative. Perhaps this moment might make readers think about John Keats himself, whose poetry—which is now seen as the highest of High Art—was in its time derided by snobbish critics as the pretentious scribblings of an upstart “Cockney poet,” a working-class kid getting above himself.
9
Q
and there, beneath …
… .
A
- Art, this poem has argued, doesn’t just hold moments in place across time. Time changes art: how people interpret it, how people receive it. And there’s a strong human impulse to romanticize the past (and to take artistic representations of the past at their face value). As the poem ends, the speaker imagines that the future poets looking at the Grayson Perry vase will feel as if they’re living beneath “a sun a little colder,” in a world that’s fallen away from the good old days, and sigh for the lucky lives of the kids on the vase.
- Just as in Keats’s poem, these last words end up becoming a mirror of the poem they close, not just the vase they describe. The idea that the “truth [is] all negotiable” reflects the poem’s sense that the world depicted in art distorts reality, capturing something true while not quite getting all the context into the picture. And the idea that “beauty [is] in the gift of the beholder,” likewise, raises an idea of subjectivity: the same scene that might look “garish” to a contemporary observer might seem like the apex of romance to the people of the future
10
Q
The Grayson Perry Vase
A
- 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.
11
Q
Form
A
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.
12
Q
Meter
A
- 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.
- 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.
