The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Antistrophe/The Counter-TurnYet some suggest that modern life,Enmeshed in doubt and mired in strife,Has little use for grandeur, pomp and show, Preferring inward grief and private woeTo be a poet’s theme. ‘So, sad as it may seem,Thy style of verse has had its dayFarewell, God speed!’ these doubters say, ‘We have no need of thee, Pindaric Ode,Our future lies along another road.’

Epode/The StandPerhaps they speak too soon, such men,Perhaps the form will rise again.A nation needs a human public voiceIts griefs to mourn, its triumphs to rejoice.When life gets mean and hard,Call out the national bard!So Pindar, tune thy golden lyre,Thou hast a people to inspire.When glory comes, or crisis darkly bodesWe may have need of thine immortal odes!

Yes, well. Quite. But you get the idea. Sappho’s fellow Aeolian, Pindar is associated with a form much more suited to ceremonial occasions and public addresses: the PINDARIC ODE. He developed it from choral dance for the purpose of making encomiums or praise songs that congratulate athletes or generals on their victories, actors on their performances, philosophers and statesmen on their wisdom and so on. They are written in groups of three stanzas called triads, each triad being divided into strophe (rhymes with ‘trophy’), antistrophe (rhymes with ‘am pissed today’) and epode (‘ee-pode’). Ben Jonson, who wrote a splendid example, gave them the jolly English names Turn, Counter-Turn and Stand. The choice of stanza length and metre is variable, so long as the poem is in triads and each stanza is identical in scheme: this consistency is called a HOMOSTROPHIC structure. I have followed the scheme Jonson invents for his ‘Pindaric Ode to the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’. He begins with a pair of tetrameters, then a pair of pentameters, then trimeters, tetrameters again and finally pentameters, all as rhyming couplets: each stanza must be identically structured, however, that is the key. As I have tried to indicate with mine, the strophe states a theme, addresses a hero, king, Muse, athlete, God or other such thing and praises them, celebrating their virtues and importance (Pindaric Odes themselves in my case); the antistrophe can express doubt, another point of view or some countervailing theme. The epode then tries to unite the two ideas, or comes down in favour of one view or the other. It is thesis, antithesis and synthesis to some extent, a dialectical structure. It derives actually from a Greek choric form in which the dancers would literally turn one way and then the other.

Horatian Ode

There are no real formal requirements to observe in a HORATIAN ODE, so I shan’t bother to write a sampler for you: they should be, like their Pindaric cousins, homostrophic. The Latin poet Horace adapted Pindar’s style to suit Roman requirements. English imitations were popular between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a most notable example being Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (written in rhyming couplets in fours and threes: ‘He nothing common did or mean/Upon that memorable scene’). Perhaps the last great two in this manner in our language are Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of Wellington’ and Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. It is common in the Horatian ode, as in the Pindaric, to include a direct address (APOSTROPHE) as Auden does:Earth, receive an honoured guest:William Yeats is laid to rest.

The Lyric Ode

Wordsworth apostrophises Nature in his Ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’:And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills and Groves!

But here we are looking at a wholly different kind of ode. Although Horace did write public celebratory odes in the Pindaric manner to suit the Roman temper (and especially the short one of his interfering patron, the Emperor Augustus) his real voice is heard in quieter, more contemplative and gently philosophical lyrics. These are the odes with which we associate the great romantics.