The ode less travelled: unlocking the poet within (34 page)

The symbol
stands for an
anceps
, a metrical unit (or
semeion
) which in classical verse can be long
or
short, but for our purposes means can be either stressed or unstressed, according to the poet’s wishes. An anceps offers a free choice of trochee or spondee in other words. So, doggerel that makes a
classical
Sapphic Ode might go:

Noble
S
APPHO
fashioned her odes of high-flown

Verse in four lines, marked by their classic profile.

Though she’s now best remembered for her full-blown

Lesbian lifestyle.

Not that Ancient Greek Sapphics would be
rhymed,
of course. English verse in this semi-quantitative classical manner does exist, although practitioners (out of Poe-like disbelief in the spondee) usually render the first three lines as trochee-trochee dactyl trochee-trochee. Ezra Pound managed a superb true spondaic line-end in his Sapphic Ode, ‘Apparuit’:

Green the ways, the breath of the fields is thine there

Dear Algie Swinburne wrote Sapphics too:

All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,

Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,

Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron

Stood and beheld me.

…

Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing

Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,

Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,

Hearing, to hear them.

The more characteristically English way to adapt the form has been to write in good old iambic tetrameter, as in my first sampler above and Pope’s ‘Ode on Solitude’:

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air

In his own ground

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire,

Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

In winter fire.

The contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson has used the form (and translated Sappho’s own odes). These two stanzas are from her ‘Eros the Bittersweet’:

no: tongue breaks and thin

fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass

I am and dead–or almost

I seem to me

The Sapphic Ode has generally been used for more personal and contemplative uses. I do recommend you try writing a few: the Adonic ending can serve as conclusion, envoi, sting in the tail, question, denial…the form, despite its simplicity, remains surprisingly potent. There is no prescribed number of stanzas. If this kind of verse appeals, you might like to look into another Lesbian form,
ALCAICS.

P
INDARIC
O
DE

Strophe/The Turn

We hail thee mighty
P
INDAR
’
S
O
DE

Thou noble and majestic mode!

You trace your roots to far-off ancient times, Yet still survive in modern English rhymes.

With firm but steady beat,

You march in rhythmic feet

Of varied but symmetric length.

This lends your verse a joyful strength

That suits it well to themes of solemn weight–

Disasters, joys and great affairs of state.

Antistrophe/The Counter-Turn

Yet 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 woe

To be a poet’s theme. ‘So, sad as it may seem,

Thy style of verse has had its day

Farewell, God speed!’ these doubters say, ‘We have no need of thee, Pindaric Ode,

Our future lies along another road.’

Epode/The Stand

Perhaps they speak too soon, such men,

Perhaps the form will rise again.

A nation needs a human public voice

Its 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 bodes

We 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 P
INDARIC
O
DE
. 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 H
ORATIAN
O
DE
, 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.

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–

A
NACREONTICS

Syllabically it’s seven.

Thematically it’s heaven,

Little lines to celebrate

Wine and love and all that’s great.

Life is fleeting, death can wait,

Trochees bounce along with zest

Telling us that Pleasure’s best.

Dithyrambic
⁸
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’ juice

Use your magic to produce

Something 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 A
NACREONTICS
(
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.