First published in 1974, this book provides a helpful overview to the ode. After introducing the reader to classical odes, it goes on to trace the development of two major types: the Pindaric ode and the Horatian ode. The book concludes with a study of odes from the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries.
This book will be of particular interest to those studying poetry, verse form and literature more generally.
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In the long, extravagant, and highly entertaining scene that dominates Act IV of Loveâs Labourâs Lost, an eavesdropper spies on an eavesdropper who spies on an eavesdropper who spies on Dumaine. All four have broken a solemn if absurd vow by falling in love, and the perfidy of each soon becomes known to all. Dumaine, entering last, is overheard by the other three when he sighs out his love for Katharine and says, âOnce more lie read the Ode that I haue writâ (IV. iii. 97). He proceeds to do so.
His âOdeâ turns out to be a short love-lyric giving fanciful expression to his personal predicament. It is quite unlike anything that we should incline to call an ode today. Shakespeare uses the word on one other occasion. In As You Like It, III. ii. 352â5, the disguised Rosalind teases the love-sick Orlando by saying, âThere is a man haunts the Forrest, that abuses our yong plants with caruing Rosalinde on their barkes; hangs Oades vpon Hauthornes, and Elegies on brambles; all (forsooth) de[i]fying the name of Rosalinde.â These âOadesâ, too, are slighter things than the title would now lead us to expect.
If a twentieth-century English reader were asked to name a few odes, Andrew Marvellâs âHoratian Ode upon Cromwelâs Return from Irelandâ, William Wordsworthâs âOde: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhoodâ, and John Keatsâs âOde to a Nightingaleâ would probably come early in his list. These are all longer and weightier poems than Dumaine and Rosalind have in mind; they are reflective, philosophical, descriptive.
Epithets such as these would be too much for the modest piece of verse that was the first in English to be dignified by the label, âOdeâ. In 1582, Thomas Watson, a minor poet who later became a friend of Christopher Marlowe, published his â
. He does not call any of his poems odes, though he does introduce the term several times in his explanatory notes; but a commendatory poem which a friend prefixed to his collection carries the title âAn Ode, written to the Muses Concerning this Authourâ. It is short: eighteen iambic pentameters, rhymed as three sestets each consisting of a quatrain followed by a couplet. It takes the form of an earnest invitation to the Muses, the âsacred Nymphes, Apolloes sisters faireâ, to reside in Britain as Watsonâs guests. In theme, form, and manner, it is closer to the ode as we now understand it than are the poems of which Dumaine and Rosalind were to speak in the following decade.
But the phrase âthe ode as we understand itâ covers a wide area of divergent and conflicting opinions. With exemplary honesty, the Oxford Dictionary reflects these in its definition: âA rimed (rarely unrimed) lyric, often in the form of an address; generally dignified or exalted in subject, feeling, and style, but sometimes (in earlier use) simple and familiar (though less so than a song)â. Here the adverbs, âoftenâ, âgenerallyâ, and âsometimesâ, and the first and last of the three parentheses, serve to blur a definition that would be unacceptable if it were sharp.
A swift review of a few other attempts at definition will further illustrate the difficulties. Edmund Gosse takes as an ode âany strain of enthusiastic and exalted lyrical verse, directed to a fixed purpose, and dealing progressively with one dignified themeâ; William Sharp suggests âthat any poem finely wrought, and full of high thinking, which is of the nature of an apostrophe, or of sustained intellectual meditation on a single theme of general purport, should be classed as an odeâ; Robert Shafer, who quotes both of these in his English Ode to 1660, requires âthat a true ode be a lyrical poem, serious in tone and stately in its structure; that it be cast in the form of an address; that it be rapid in style, treating its subject with âbrevity and varietyâ; and that its unity be emotional in characterâ (p. 3); and George N. Shuster, after quoting further attempts in his English Ode from Milton to Keats, declares that the âelement of address is of no especial significance, being merely a reflection of the classical influenceâ, and for the purposes of his treatise takes an ode to be âa lyric poem derived, either directly or indirectly, from Pindaric modelsâ (pp. 11â12).
This last phrase offers us a useful clue. Many English odes belong to a tradition stemming from the work of the Classical Greek poet, Pindar, and many others belong to a tradition stemming from that of the Classical Latin poet, Horace. The two traditions can mingle, Horace himself having become something of a Pindarist. From the Romantic period onwards, we lose sight of each for long stretches; but, before that period, if they are often inseparable they are rarely indistinguishable.
Shuster would add two other great exemplars: the Greek, Anacreon; and King David the Psalmist. Anacreonâs influence has been considerable, but it appears in songs and short lyrics rather than in odes; and, while the Psalmist has provided a pervasive inspiration throughout much of our literature, he has not influenced the actual form of our odes. Pindar and Horace remain for our purposes the two dominant figures. By examining the tradition descending from each, we shall be helping ourselves to a clearer understanding of the range and variety of poetic achievement possible in the ode. We must start with Pindar and Horace themselves.
PINDAR
In the seventh and sixth centuries before Christ, Greek lyrics, or poems to be sung to the lyre, took two forms. There were monodies, sung by single persons, and choral odes, sung by choirs. If we may judge by the fragments in which their works have come down to us, Alcaeus and Sappho were among the finest monodists. But our main concern is with the choral odes.
These had originated in religious celebrations and were performed at festivals and on other important occasions, human and divine. They normally included four elements: prayers or praise to the gods, stories or myths from the heroic past, moral maxims, and personal references appropriate to the circumstances of the performance. Their tone was grave and dignified.
Naturally, they developed differently in the hands of different poets. Though the extant writings of Aleman and Stesichorus are tantalizingly fragmentary, critics have felt able to speak of the freshness and charm of the former and the heroic temper of the latter. To a third poet, Simonides, is ascribed the shaping of the epinician ode, the choral song in honour of a victory in the Olympic or other games. This was to find its greatest exponent in Pindar (518 B.C.âc. 438 B.C.).
The games are little more than Pindarâs point of departure. From them he invariably proceeds with little or no delay to matters of wider scope and deeper significance. Men win in the games, he believes, because they have natural talent, develop it by hard toil, and enjoy the favour of the gods. Life everywhere owes its splendour to just such high endeavour as they manifest. Their successes bring them exhilaration and exaltation, an extension and enrichment of consciousness, a dazzling glory, and a sort of immortality in the memory of an admiring posterity.
For if any man delights in expense and effort
And sets in action high gifts shaped by the Gods,
And with him his destiny Plants the glory which he desires,
Already he casts his anchor on the furthest edge of bliss,
And the Gods honour him.
(âIsthmian VIâ: trans. Bowra)
Seeing this significance in sporting triumphs, Pindar is a deeply religious poet.
The restriction of his immediate subject-matter does not prevent him from displaying considerable enterprise and boldness in his handling of details. He introduces myths which he has chosen for their relevance to his themes or patrons or both. He handles these myths briefly and allusively, often leaving his reader or hearer to supply links between the topics on which he touches and to guess intentions which he does not declare. His boldness and swiftness show, too, in his syntax and in his choice of words. But he always works within regular metrical and stanzaic limits. Thirty-eight of his forty-four epinician odes are written in triads. Each triad consists of three stanzas: strophe, antistrophe, and epode. In any single ode, all the strophes and antistrophes have one and the same metrical form. The metrical form of the epodes differs from this, but it remains the same for all the epodes in the poem. The triadic form, said to have been invented by Stesichorus, was a favourite not only with Pindar but also with his contemporary and rival, Bacchylides. It relates to the dancing which accompanied the singing of an ode; during the strophe and antistrophe the chorus would be in movement, while during the epode it would be at rest.
Pindar was both a painstaking craftsman and an ardent believer in the need for inspiration. The Greeks felt that he sometimes failed to maintain the elevation and magnificence of his best writing. But this did not prevent them from considering him their greatest lyric poet.
HORACE
Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65 B.C.â8 B.C.) lived four hundred and fifty years later, at a time when a monarchical order was displacing the old republican order in Rome. He served as an officer in the republican army that suffered defeat at Philippi and has left in one of his odes a cheerfully self-depreciatory allusion to his jettisoning his shield in the flight. Before long he made his peace with the new authorities, and through his patron and friend Maecenas he became favourably known to Augustus himself.
Horace was no fanatic. He enjoyed a quiet life and practised a moderate, though quite unspeculative, Epicureanism. He was a keen observer, and in his poetry he raised worldly common sense to the level of wisdom. In his Satires, he does what Ben Jonson was later to profess to do, that is, he sports with human follies, not with crimes. He is equally cool and poised in his Epistles, easy and elegant poems of manners and society.
Some of the characteristic qualities of his Odes may be suggested to readers who have little Latin by the example of a poem which John Milton translated into English. In this, Horace addresses the inconstant Pyrrha, whose latest lover fondly hopes that she will remain always free and amiable. In fact, she will change as completely as the sea changes when dark winds bring storms. Horace pities those to whom she still seems fair. He has himself narrowly escaped drowning, and a votive tablet on the temple wall shows that he has hung up his wet garments as an offering to Neptune.
