Horatian Ode

5 Key excerpts on "Horatian Ode"

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  A Little Book on Form

  An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

  • Robert Hass(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Ecco

    (Publisher)

  This poem is written in a meter modeled on a Greek poet, Asclepiades, who lived about two hundred years before Horace’s time. It seems to be a song meter, and he uses it in several of the odes when he wants to evoke the idea of a wild party. People who could read his poems at the time when Latin was a living language always comment on the combination of freedom and restraint in his poems, or spontaneity and elegance, thought to be incompatible qualities, because elegance takes time and care. The formal radiance of this poem, one has to assume, comes from that paradoxical mix. And it’s there thematically. The formal development of the poem involves several turns. There is in the first stanza the rejection of Roman gravitas and of the solemn genealogies that characterize the Pindaric ode. And in the second stanza the turn instead to preparations for the party, and in the third stanza, the elaboration of that theme in a more galloping rhythm, an address to his friend and an intensifying of the theme. And in the next stanza—in the middle of the poem—the debate between license and restraint. Horace is famously the poet of sensible restraint as a kind of practical hedonism. And so the next two stanzas are the next turn, lines for which he is famous possibly because centuries of schoolboys had to translate them under strict supervision. He wants to rave. He wants roses scattered. And then the social turn again to his friend, not to a declaration of erotic desire exactly, as in the address to a lover, but to a more sociable and conspiratorial relation to it, so that the poem doesn’t so much model eros as it does friendship. And it ends with a kind of confession. He wants to rave because he’s been driven wild. That fire does not represent freedom. A complicated and grown-up poem in which the expressiveness of the prosody and the formal development of the themes work together strikingly.

  10.      For posterity a mix of casualness, elegance, and moderation came to characterize what people thought of as the “lesser ode.” Ben Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper” is the illustrious example of the English Horatian mode. Horace, in fact, shows up in the poem, which scholars say borrows a few lines from the epigrams of Martial. It connects to the ode as a praise poem because it models sociability and because it contains a petition. It’s an invitation. I won’t reproduce all of it here. You can find it easily. But look at the beginning:

              Tonight, grave sir, both my poor house and I

                  Do equally desire your company.

              Not that we think us worthy such a guest,

                  But that your worth will dignify our feast

              With those that come, whose grace may make that seem

                  Something, which else could hope for no esteem.

              It is the fair acceptance, sir, creates

                  The entertainment perfect, not the cates.

  Casual elegance. Jonson does it with iambic pentameter couplet, rhymed. The pentameter gives a kind of suavity to what sounds like spoken English, the couplet form gives a kind of complementarity to the address—“grave sir” and “my poor house and I” are the antitheses—and Jonson is able to tune up or tune down the effect of the rhyme by enjambing it or not. The rhymes get particularly strong just when Horace and wine show up:

              Digestive cheese, and fruit there sure will be,

                  But that which most doth take my Muse and me

              Is a pure cup of rich Canary wine,

                  Which is the Mermaid’s now, but shall be mine;

              Of which had Horace or Anacreon tasted,

                  Their lives, as do their lines, till now have lasted.

  These poems, you could almost call them anti-ode odes, have been a model for many kinds of poetry that praise poetry and the private life by not being about important subjects. It is work very much like the sensibility of Frank O’Hara and other poets of the New York School, like—in general—the informality of American poets in the postwar generation as they responded to and against the solemnity of high modernism.

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  They Keep It All Hid

  Augustan Poetry, its Antecedents and Reception

  • Peter E. Knox, Hayden Pelliccia, Alexander Sens, Peter E. Knox, Hayden Pelliccia, Alexander Sens(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  As men are strong or weak. (39 f.)

  Marvell had earlier worked in detail with Ode 1.2, adapting it to celebrate the birth of Charles’ daughter Anne in 1636/7 in Ad Regem Carolum Parodia , from which close encounter he will have learned much about the nuts and bolts of Horatian lyric.327 It is impossible in English, a language less fully inflected than Latin, to reproduce Horace’s dense “mosaic of words”, each slotted perfectly into place, in which, in the often quoted words from Nietzsche, “every word, by sound, by position and by meaning, diffuses its force right, left, and over the whole, that minimum in the compass and number of signs, that maximum thus realised in their energy”, which “[i]n certain languages … cannot even be hoped for” (Milton is probably the English poet who on occasion gets closest to such a compacted way of writing).328 The opening stanzas of “An Horatian Ode” recall lines from the Ode to Iccius (1.29) where Horace twits a friend for exchanging Socratic books for Spanish breastplates to go on a lucrative military expedition. Marvell captures the concreteness of Horace's style and his tendency to argue in images, not abstractly:

  ’Tis time to leave the books in dust, And oil the unusèd armour’s rust; Removing from the wall The corselet of the hall. (5 – 8) Instead of a general statement “it is time to exchange peace for war”, we are given vivid pictures of associated activities.

  The Ode adheres to a lyric subgenre (prosphonetikon in the terminology of the rhetoricians), in which the poet praises a general returning victorious from a campaign (Horatian examples include 3.14 and 4.4). And indeed Marvell has a number of Horace’s Odes in view, not a single model (another poem that makes its contribution is 4.2). But he pays special attention to 1.37, the so-called “Cleopatra Ode” celebrating the battle of Actium and its aftermath (though Cleopatra is never named, simply termed, in sinister gendered opposition to the victorious Octavian, regina , “queen”). Horace likes to begin an Ode with a translation or motto taken from one of his Greek predecessors; similarly Marvell's “now” (2), acting as a signal, translates Horace's opening nunc (“now we must drink”) and “’tis time” (5) his tempus erat.

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  Latin Explorations (Routledge Revivals)

  Critical Studies in Roman Literature

  • Kenneth Quinn(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  More recently the theory has been lent fresh life by Professor Howald, who argues that Horace, like the French symbolists, subordinated meaning to verbal poetry. 33 For Collinge, the odes are Very largely exercises in form, to the exclusion of content’ (p. viii). II, 14 he finds a sorry string of moral clichés: 34 ii.  14 (Eheu fugaces) almost looks like a cento of Horatian commonplaces—the inexorable flight of time, the tearless nether gods, the universality of death, the uselessness of attempts to evade it. No particular pattern emerges for sixteen verses, apart from a shift at v. 9 from the second to the universalizing first person plural. The four stanzas simply say that death has no regard for (1) character, (2) offerings, (3) status, (4) evasive action. Of course he is right—so long as we take it for granted the ode is a verse epistle; or, as Collinge calls it, ‘an open letter to a Roman gentleman’. But that means ignoring clear hints in the poem of dramatic form. As for being a sermon, the ode can only be regarded as an attempt at constructive moralizing (as many, less roundly condemnatory than Collinge, would allow) by ignoring the palpable clue which Horace provides, as we shall see, to warn the reader that he is philosophically uncommitted to the moralizing; and interested instead, as in iv, 13, in the situation in which the monologue is spoken, and which it evokes. The scene implied is a rather different sort of dinner party from those in i, 27 or iv, 13. The reader is once again called upon to fill in the semi-extraneous details for himself, and each reader will naturally fill them in differently. 35 A speaker (whom we should be ingenuous in taking to be Horace himself) breaks in on a conversation to address his host, Postumus, with a gloomy earnestness that comes (we may suspect, taking up a hint in the last stanza) as much from what he has imbibed of his host’s liquor as from what he has imbibed of Epicurean philosophy

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  Andrew Marvell

  • Thomas Healy(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 Such interpretations, however, have been liable to criticism as historical readings which fail to take account of the poem’s literary qualities. The terms of that antithesis need challenging: it is precisely by sharpening the analysis of the poem’s formal properties beyond a narrow conception of the ‘literary’ that it becomes possible to return it to history. Recent scholarship, in regaining an understanding of rhetoric and genre, has become better equipped to understand the links between poetry and politics. Rather than seeing the Ode as pure literature, and Marvell as an isolated genius transcending lesser poets who wrote mere propaganda, it becomes possible to recover the role of the poem’s generic acts in a far wider cultural movement. In the analysis of the poem as act, many questions remain to be answered: Marvell’s own personal allegiances and the circumstances of the poem’s production and reception remain obscure. I believe, however, that the hypothesis of the Ode as radically revisionary opens the way to making more sense both of the poem and of its context.

  Both parts of the poem’s title arouse royalist expectations. In giving the bald generic characterisation ‘Horatian Ode’ – as far as I know uniquely – Marvell evoked the royalist admiration of Horace, with his cult of peace under a worthy emperor. In an Ode of 1630 Sir Richard Fanshawe celebrated Charles’s preservation of the peace while ‘warre is all the world about’.4 Marvell himself had written a monarchist Horatian Ode, a close imitation of the second ode of the first book which he contributed to a volume of panegyrics in 1637. In the aftermath of the Second Civil War there had been a resurgence of royalist Horatianism, and Fanshawe’s Ode was one of many ceremonial poems from the 1630s which were published as a loyal gesture in the period leading up to the regicide. The other element in the title, the reference to a return, is also a strong generic signal. Renaissance rhetoric recognised a distinct kind of demonstrative or panegyrical oration, a celebration of a hero’s return, a prosphonetikon or epibaterion. Horace’s odes were regularly classified in Renaissance editions according to panegyrical genres: for example, the fourth ode of the fourth book, long recognised as one of Marvell’s chief models for his Ode, was classed as a prosphonetikon.

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  Selected Papers on Ancient Literature and its Reception

  • Philip Russell Hardie(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  fingo means literally ‘to make by shaping’ a malleable material, such as the sculptor’s clay or molten metal, or the bee’s wax. Horace as poet is more like the sculptors on whom Pindar looks down from his Olympian flight.

  In this ode the contrast between the flow of song and the fixity of the plastic art is only a moment in a more complicated exploration of the limits and pretensions of Horatian lyric, that continues into the next poem, C . 4.3. C . 4.2 concludes with an image of the poet as merely one of the crowd cheering on the triumphing emperor, and offering the humble sacrifice of a calf. 4.3, by contrast, is one of Horace’s boldest attempts to place himself on a level with the emperor, reworking the theme of alternative paths to success with which Horace begins in C . 1.1. The poet will not achieve fame through athletic victory, nor will he be displayed on the Capitol as a triumphator (10–16): ‘But the waters that flow by fertile Tivoli and the dense foliage of the groves will sculpt me into nobility through Aeolian song’. The Tiburtine landscape of river and grove, where in the previous poem Horace sculpts his poems (C . 4.2.29–32) now ‘sculpt him into nobility by his Aeolian song’. ‘Here the speaker [takes on] attributes of a statue.... He is one with the permanence of his lovely song’.1655 In what follows the contrast of lines 6–12 between public exhibition in Rome and the private showing at Tivoli is undermined:

  Romae principis urbium dignatur suboles inter amabilis

  uatum ponere me choros ,

  et iam dente minus mordeor inuido .

  o, testudinis aureae

  dulcem quae strepitum, Pieri, temperas ,

  o mutis quoque piscibus

  donatura cycni, si libeat, sonum ,

  totum muneris hoc tui est ,

  quod monstror digito praetereuntium

  Romanae fidicen lyrae :

  quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est .

  (C . 4.3.13–24)

  The children of Rome, first of cities, award me the honour of a place among the loveable choirs of bards, and now Envy’s tooth gnaws at me less. O Muse, you who tune the sweet sound of the golden tortoise-shell, you who would also give the swan’s voice to dumb fish if it so pleased you, it is entirely your gift that passers-by point me out with their finger as the player of the Roman lyre; that I breathe and please, if I please, is your doing.

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