Poetry: The Forms and the History The Ode by Catherine Wilson

Ode

The ode is an elaborately structured lyrical poem praising and glorifying an individual, commemorating an event, or describing nature intellectually rather than emotionally. Odes originally were songs performed with a music. Here are a couple of examples of Odes.

Classic Odes

Among the ancient Greeks, odes fell into two categories: choral odes and those to be sung by one person. The choral ode, patterned after the movements of the chorus in Greek drama, has a three-part stanza structure: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. This structure marks a turn from one intellectual position to another and then a description of the entire ode subject. The strophe and antistrophe have the same metrical scheme; the epode has a different structure. Pindar is considered the greatest lyric poet of Greece and the best-known writer of choral odes; portions of his work include 45 victory odes commemorating the ancient Olympic Games.
In Greece, Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, and others refined the single-voice ode. These poets differed from Pindar in their use of a simpler structure: a metrical scheme that is the same in each of the three stanzas. The stanzas also are ordered more regularly and have a more personal style than those in the Pindaric odes. Roman poets such as Horace and Catullus imitated the Greeks’ single-voice odes, but they wrote them to be read rather than sung.

Modern Odea

The modern form of the ode dates from the Renaissance (14th to 17th centuries); like the Latin ode it is pure poetry and not intended for music. The French poet Pierre de Ronsard wrote odes in both the Pindaric and the Horatian styles. The earliest English odes include the “Epithalamion” and the “Prothalamion,” or marriage hymns, by the 16th-century poet Edmund Spenser. English writers of odes in the 17th century included Ben Jonson and Andrew Marvell, who wrote in the Horatian mode, and John Milton, whose ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” follows Pindaric form.
Milton’s contemporary, Abraham Cowley, failed to understand the strophe-antistrophe-epode divisions of the classical Pindaric and Horatian ode, but he impressed his own conception of the ode as a lofty and tempestuous composition on later English and American literature. As a result, the ode in English is usually a succession of stanzas in lines of varying length and meter.
A rebirth of the ode occurred during the 18th century. The English writers John Dryden and Alexander Pope both wrote odes commemorating Saint Cecilia, patron of sacred music, Dryden’s work being intended for a musical setting.
The Englishman William Collins, one of the greatest lyric poets of the age, wrote exquisite nature odes, such as “To Evening.” During the romantic period in England, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote “Ode to the West Wind” and John Keats produced his great odes, including “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
The popularity of the ode form waned during Victorian times (1837-1901), but interest in it was revived in the 20th century with works such as “Ode to the Confederate Dead” by the American writer Allen Tate and a variety of ode lyrics by the English poet W. H. Auden.

Ode on a Grecian Urn
Poetry of John Keats (1795-1821)

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

ODE TO THE CONFEDERATE DEAD
Poetry of Allen Tate

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element,
The wind whirrs without recollection;
In the riven troughs the splayed leaves
Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament
To the seasonal eternity of death;
Then driven by the fierce scrutiny
Of heaven to their election in the vast breath,
They sough the rumour of mortality.

Autumn is desolation in the plot
Of a thousand acres where these memories grow
From the inexhaustible bodies that are not
Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row.
Think of the autumns that have come and gone!-
Ambitious November with the humors of the year,
With a particular zeal for every slab,
Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot
On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there:
The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare

Turns you, like them, to stone,
Transforms the heaving air
Till plunged to a heavier world below
You shift your sea-space blindly
Heaving, turning like the blind crab.

Dazed by the wind, only the wind
The leaves flying, plunge

You know who have waited by the wall
The twilight certainty of an animal,
Those midnight restitutions of the blood
You know-the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze
Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage,
The cold pool left by the mounting flood,
Of muted Zeno and Parmenides.
You who have waited for the angry resolution
Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow,
You know the unimportant shrift of death
And praise the vision
And praise the arrogant circumstance
Of those who fall
Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision-
Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall.

Seeing, seeing only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

Turn your eyes to the immoderate past,
Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising
Demons out of the earth-they will not last.
Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp,
Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run.
Lost in that orient of the thick-and-fast
You will curse the setting sun.

Cursing only the leaves crying
Like an old man in a storm

You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point
With troubled fingers to the silence which
Smothers you, a mummy, in time.

The hound bitch
Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar
Hears the wind only.

Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood,

What shall we who count our days and bow
Our heads with a commemorial woe
In the ribboned coats of grim felicity,
What shall we say of the bones, unclean,
Whose verdurous anonymity will grow?
The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes
Lost in these acres of the insane green?
The gray lean spiders come, they come and go;
In a tangle of willows without light
The singular screech-owl’s tight
Invisible lyric seeds the mind
With the furious murmur of their chivalry.

We shall say only the leaves
Flying, plunge and expire

We shall say only the leaves whispering
In the improbable mist of nightfall
That flies on multiple wing;
Night is the beginning and the end
And in between the ends of distraction
Waits mute speculation, the patient curse
That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps
For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim.

What shall we say who have knowledge
Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act
To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the
grave
In the house? The ravenous grave?

Leave now
The shut gate and the decomposing wall-
The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush,
Riots with his tongue through the hush-
Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!