It struck me for the first time how very few people will be able to fully appreciate Tim Turnbull’s poem, Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn. And that small number of people is decreasing all the time. It is ideally placed to be part of the Poems of the Decade anthology studied by A level literature students (Edexcel). Young people, steeped in youth culture, full of vitality, open to risk and preoccupied by sex and fun, will very clearly see a link between themselves and the young people depicted on Turnbull’s imaginary Grayson Perry Urn. But, in contrast with most other youngsters, they will also appreciate, not only the language and form of the poem, but also the links between this modern verse and John Keats’ poem Ode to a Grecian Urn. Without that vital bit of cultural knowledge, so much of the meaning will be opaque. As we drift in time further and further away both from Keats (and those who think studying him is important) and from the youth culture of the noughties, the pool of readers who will be able to fully grasp this poem without substantial footnotes grows fewer and fewer. The poem is almost like a sand sculpture being gradually eroded by the tide.

The conceit is that, like Keats’ Grecian Urn depicting a scene from Ancient Greece, an urn by Grayson Perry has caught a scene from our modern culture and immortalised it, frozen it, guarded it from decay and preserved it for future generations. The poem echoes Keats’ masterpiece from beginning to end. The verse form of Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn is the most obvious, but probably the least interesting, echo of Keats’ original poem. To me, the contrast of imagined sounds which the two scenes create is far more evocative. In contrast to Keats’ unheard melodies on ‘pipes and timbrels’, Turnbull describes the ‘joyful throb’ of garage and house, ‘the screech of tyres and the nervous squeals of girls’.

The love which Keats writes of is ‘for ever warm and still to be enjoy’d/For ever panting, and for ever young’, just like that of the ‘buff’ girls and ‘toned and strong’ geezers in Turnbull’s version. Here, however, instead of the delicate ‘human passion’, we have ‘Calvin’s’ and ‘thongs’ ‘charged with pulsing juice…never to be deflated’. The humour in the juxtaposition of Keats’ pipes and Turnbull’s screeching tyres, of Keats’ passion and Turnbull’s chlamydia ridden couplings in cars is what takes the sting out of the caustic description of today’s youth. Turnbull does not forget to highlight those young people’s vulnerability, calling them ‘children’ and saying they are ‘too young to quite appreciate the peril they are in’. That warmth infuses the poem with a care for these fun-seekers, which otherwise would have looked like a demolition of today’s youth culture.

The humour in the incongruity of the levels of language also lends the poem a warmth to temper the brutal depiction of urban youth culture. The poem begins with the colloquial ‘Hello! What’s all this here?’ and evokes a teenage voice in words like ‘crap’ ‘buff’ and ‘geezer’.  These contrast starkly with academic, highly educated terms such as ‘delineating’, ‘gaudy evocation’ and ‘peril’. Of course this just mirrors the incongruity between Grayson Perry’s urn and the Grecian urn, Greek youth and modern British youth, as well as Keats’ classical poetry and Turnbull’s modern verse. The third voice is the one I like most, however. It is the voice of the middle-aged curtain-twitcher.  It is the voice of the ‘complaining cardigan’ is what I wrote in the margins of the poem when I first read it. Phrases like ‘creating Bedlam on the Queen’s Highway’ seem to come straight out of the Daily Mail. Turnbull’s irreverence is generously sprinkled over everyone, but his warmth and compassion he reserves for those youth who are not lucky enough to have been immortalised (and therefore saved from danger) on the modern urn.

In the last part of the poem, Turnbull expects us to have Keats’ maxim in mind: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’. In his poem, however, there are no certainties, ‘truth is negotiable’ and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. On some level I feel there is a genuine admiration for our modern, insubstantial relativism in this, even through the satire. But what is left, for me, is the feeling that freezing them in time, our young people’s joy and lust for life remains, though the danger and consequences do not. The dirty, every-day life those children share cannot be frozen or idealised, though, in stopping for a moment in attempting to, we can see more clearly their joy and passion as well as their vulnerability.

The irony is that, as the understanding of Turnbull’s poem diminishes, the poem itself becomes like both the Grecian urn and Grayson Perry’s urn: a half-glimpsed snapshot of a half-understood culture. The nuances will fade to leave a static picture of a culture long vanished, the poet’s intentions even more difficult to discern, the people it depicts even more difficult to reach. That the poem feels so ephemeral seems even to heighten its beauty.