The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

These poets created their own forms, varying their stanzaic structure and length, rhyme-scheme and measure for each poem. To call them ‘odes’ in the classical sense is perhaps inappropriate, but since they used the word we can include them in this section. The great Keats foursome emerged more from his development of sonnet structure than out of any debt to Horace or Pindar, yet the meditative-romantic or lyric ode that he and his fellow poets between them created does still bear the traces of a general tripartite structure. They do not follow the stricter triadic design of the Pindaric form, but usually move from physical description to meditation and finally to some kind of insight, resolution or stasis. An object, phenomenon or image is invoked, addressed or observed by an (often troubled) ode writer; the observation provokes thought which in turn results in some kind of conclusion, decision or realisation. We will meet this structure again when we look at the sonnet. Whether the lyric ode truly descends from the classical ode or from the medieval sonnet is a historical and academic matter which, while of no doubt frantic interest, we shall leave unexplored.

Often the poet, as in grand public odes, opens with direct address: Shelley does so in ‘Skylark’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’:Hail to thee, blithe spirit!Bird thou never wert.O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being–

Or they apostrophise their hero later in the poem as Keats does the Nightingale and Autumn:Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

But it is so usual to open a poem with an invocation, ‘O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers’ (‘To Psyche’), ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ (‘On a Grecian Urn’), that you might almost define the romantic ode as being a meditative poem that commences with a direct address, an address which puts the O! in Ode, as it were.

If you are planning to write an ode yourself, it is unlikely, I suspect, to be Pindaric or Horatian in any classical, ceremonial sense; you may choose to call anything you write an ode, but it is as well to bear in mind the history and associations that go with the appellation.

We will finish with the most pleasant member of the ode family in my estimation. It combines a wholly agreeable nature with a delightfully crunchy name and ought by rights to be far more popular and better known than it is: simple to write, simple to read and easy to agree with, meet–

ANACREONTICSSyllabically it’s seven.Thematically it’s heaven,Little lines to celebrateWine and love and all that’s great.Life is fleeting, death can wait,Trochees bounce along with zestTelling us that Pleasure’s best.Dithyrambic⁸ measures traipse,Pressing flesh and pressing grapes.Fill my glass and squeeze my thighs,Hedonism takes the prize.Broach the bottle, time to pour!Cupid’s darts and Bacchus’ juiceUse your magic to produceSomething humans can enjoy.Grab a girl, embrace a boy,Strum your lyre and hum this tune–Life’s too quick and death’s too soon.

Anacreon (pronounced: Anácreon) was a sixth-century Greek poet whose name lives on in the style of verse that bears his name ANACREONTICS (anacreóntics). Actually, we barely know anything he wrote, his reputation rests on a haul of work called the Anacreontea, published in France in the sixteenth century. It was later discovered that these were actually not works by him, but later imitations written in his honour. No matter, Anacreon had been venerated by Horace, who shared his sybaritic, Epicurean philosophy, and by many English-language poets from Herrick and Cowley to the present day.

There was an Anacreontic Society in the eighteenth century dedicated to ‘wit, harmony and the god of wine,’ though its real purpose became the convivial celebration of music, hosting evenings for Haydn and other leading musicians of the day, as well as devising their own club song: ‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’. A society member, John Stafford Smith, wrote the music for it, a tune which somehow got pinched by those damn Yankees who use it to this day for their national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’–‘Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light’ and so on. Strange to think that the music now fitting

…yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

was actually written to fit

…entwineThe myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s wine!

And this in a country where they prohibited alcohol for the best part of a quarter of a century, a country where they look at you with pitying eyes if you order a weak spritzer at lunchtime. Tsch!

The poet most associated with English anacreontics is the seventeenth-century Abraham Cowley: here he is extolling Epicureanism over Stoicism in ‘The Epicure’:Crown me with roses while I live,Now your wines and ointments give:After death I nothing crave,Let me alive my pleasures have:All are Stoics in the grave.