Forms of Ode

Topic: Forms of Ode (types)

Paper: 5

Paper Name: Romantic Literature

Name:JasaniNidhi R.

Roll No.: 16

Class: M.A. Sem.2

Year: 2014-2015

P.G. Enrolment No:14101018

Submitted to: Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University.

Introduction

“Ode” comes from the Greek word aeidein, meaning to sing or chant, and belong to the long and varied tradition of lyric poetry.  Originally accompanied by music and dance,and later reserved by the Romantic poets to convey their strongest sentiments, the ode can be generalized as a formal address to an event, a person, or a thing not present.

Ode was a public poem, usually set to music that celebrated athletic victories. In other word an ode is a poetic that’s best described as a song or poem written in praise or celebration of an object, a place, an experience, and a person, things or idea. It is a positive, usually exuberant piece of work that today need not be written in meter or rhyme, though a poet may choose to use these devices (style) if they (poet) wish.

Generally we can says that the ode is the go-to form of those who wish to offer tribute to something or someone that, in the moment, is no longer present, either in the room, the poet’s life,  or the world, when looking for, happening upon an ode. We found three types of odes:

(1)Pindaric ode,(2) Horatian ode,(3) Irregular ode.

First some characteristics of ode

·      A single, unified strain of exalted lyrical verse.

·      Tends to focus on purpose and theme.

·      Its tone and manner is typically elaborate, dignified, and imaginative.

The prototype was established by the Greek poet Pindar, whose odes were modeled on the songs by the chorus in Greek drama (Pindar, ca. 552-442 B.C.E.). His complex stanzas were patterned in sets of three: moving in a dance rhyme to the left, the chorus chanted the strophe; moving to the right, the antistrophe; thane, standing still, the epode. 

For understand ode in batter way first we come to know about what is mining of strophe, antistrophe, and epode.

Strophe

Strophe is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the ode in ancient Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. The term also has been extended to also mean a structural division of a poem containing stanza of varying line length. Strophic poetry is to be contrasted with poems composed line-by non-stanzaically, such as Greek epic poems or English blank verse, to which the term stichicapplies. In its original Greek setting, “strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the music,” as john Milton wrote in the preface to Samson Agonists.

In a more general sense, the strophe is a pair of alternating form on which the structure of a giving poem is based, with the stanza in modern poetry and its arrangement and recurrence of rhymes giving it its character. But the Greeks called a combination of verse-periods system, giving only when it was repeated once or more in unmodified form.

Antistrophe

Antistrophe is the portion of an ode sung by the chorus in its returning movement from east to west, in response to the strophe, which was sung from east to west. It has the nature of a replyand balances the effect of strophe. Thus, in gray’s ode called “The Progress of Poesy”, the strophe, which dwelt in triumphant accents on the beauty, power and ecstasy verse, is answered by the antistrophe, in a depressed and melancholy key:

“Man’s feeble race what ills await,

Labour, and penury, the Racks of pain,

Disease and sorrows

Weeping Train,

And Death, sad refuge

From the storms of Fate,”

When the section of the chorus has ended their responses, they unite and close in the epode, thus exemplifying the triple m in which the ancient sacred hymns of Greece were coined, form the days of stesichorus onwards.

Epode

In verse, is the third part of an ode, which followed the strophe and an antistrophe, and completed the movement.At a certain point in time the choirs, which had previously chanted to left of it, combined and sang in unison, or permitted the coryphaeus to sing for them all, while standing in the center. With the appearance of stesichorus and the evolution of choral lyric, a learned and artificial kind of poetry began to be cultivated in Greece, and a new form, the epode-song, came into existence. It consisted of a verse of iambic trimester, followed byverse of iambic dimeter, and it is reported that, although the epode was carried to its highest perfection by Stesichorus, an earlier poet, Archilochus, was really the inventor of this form.

The epode soon took a firm place in choral poetry, which it lost when that branch of literature declined. But it extended beyond the ode. The word is now mainly familiar from an experiment of Horace in the second class, for he entitled his fifth book of odes Epodon liber or the Book of Epodes. He says in the course of these poems, that in composing them he was introducing a new form, at least in Latin literature, and that he was imitating the effect of the iambic distichs invented byArchilochus. Accordingly, we find the first ten of these epodes composed in alternate verses of iambic trimeter and iambic dimeter.

The regular or Pindaric ode

Pindaric ode in English is a close imitation of Pindar’s form, with all the strophes and antisrophes written in one stanza pattern and all the epodes in another. The ode is so named for the ancient Greek poet Pindar, the man who is said to have brought the writing of odes into fashion. Also Pin-dar-ick an ode in a form popularized in the 1600s by Abraham Cowley, employing lines of irregular lengths and an irregular rhyme scheme.   Pindaric odes, in the Greek tradition, were performed with the usual chorus and dancers, and the themes of choice usually centered on athletics- athletes, athletic abilities and athletic victories. Each ode came with a formal beginning, an invocation, prayer, myth, a moral and a conclusion, all spun together in a complex construction of different meters and patterns of lines. The outcome, however, was always a work of great intensity. The William Wordsworth poem “Ode on Intimation of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” is a very good example of an English language Pindaric ode. Ode is in faction in England during the close of the 17^th and the beginning of the 18^th century. Also this form was introduced into England by Ben Jonson’s ode “To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of That Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison” (1629); the typical construction can be conveniently studied in this poem or in Thomas gray’s “the Progress of Poesy”
(1757)

Hear one example of a Pindaric ode poem

(Based on an extract from “theprogress of poesy’ by Thomas Gray)

“Wake up, you little sleep head, awake             a               And give great joy to life that’s found in

Dreams                                                                    b

Form Nature’s most sweet sounding streams  b

A thousand turres their twisty journeys take    a

The dancing flowers, that above them blow     c

Breathe life and music as they flow                    c

Now the vast waves of sound drift along           d

Deep beautiful, vast and strong                          d

Through the fields and vales and valleys they glide                                                                           e

And rolling down the mountain side                   e

Daring and carefree the water pours                   f

From the highest edge they jump and falling, they roar.  f”

The above poem with rhyming pattern

(a b b  a c c  d d  e e  f f )

Horatian ode

Horatian ode, short lyric poem written in stanzas of two or four line in the manner of the 1^st –century-Bc Latin poet Horace.In contrast to the lofty, heroic odes of Geek poet Pindar, most of Horace’s odes are intimate and reflective; they are often addressed to a friend and deal with friendship, love and the practice of poetry. In other word the passion, visionary boldness, and formal language of Pindar’s ode, many Horatian odes are calm, meditative, and colloquial; they are also usually homostrophic (that is, written in a single repeated stanza form), and shorter than the Pindaric ode.

 Apart from this, Horatian introduced early Greek lyrics into Latin by adapting Greek metres, regularizing them, and writing his Romanized versions with a discipline that caused some loss of detachment but produced elegance and dignity. But he cautioned Latin writers not to attempt to emulate Pindar, a task that he likened to lcarus’ presumptuous flight. Horace’s carmina, written in stanzas of two or four lines, are now universally called odes, but they have nothing in common with the passionate brilliance of Pindaric odes. Horace’s tone is generally serious and serene, often touched with irony and melancholy but sometimes with gentle humor. His urbane Epicureanism and personal charm, his aphoristic philosophy and studied perfection won him recognition as Rome’s leading poet after the death of his friend Virgil.

Michael Drayton, in Poems Lyric and pastoral (1606), acknowledged his indebtedness to Horace, and Andrew Marvell produced one of the finest English Horatian odes in 1650 on Cromwell’s return from Ireland. In the early 18^th century, Matthew Prior, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson revived the Horatian spirit, as did Giacomo Leopardi and Giosue Carducci in Italy in the 19^th century.

 One example of Horatian ode written by P.B. Shelley

 “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence- striken multitudes! O thou

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each likes a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odors plain and hill:

Wild spirit which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear!”

 This is Horatian Ode construct. Shelley developed a stanza length, rhyme scheme, and meter that he carried through this stanza and the four that followed. He ended each of the first three stanza with the proclamation.

Irregular ode

The irregular ode-an ode without any predetermined topic or structure- that may be written with or without rhyme, may be short or long, may be serious silly, and may meditate on the huge and fantastic or the small and simple. What these odes often have in common, however, is a sense of the speaker being overwhelmed by the very goodness and glory of her subject. This sort of tone might be described as unabashedly indulgent, or even exclamatory. That side, many irregular odes maintain quietness about them, a simply spoken sense that conveys the poet’s speaker is feeling wonderfully warm, moved and satisfied because of her or his subject, that which she is praising.

In very simple word irregular ode, also called the Cowleyan Ode, was in traduced in 1656 by Abraham Cowley, who imitate the Pindaric style and matter but disregarded the recurrent stanzaic pattern in each strophic triad; instead, he allowed each stanza to establish its own pattern of varying line lengths, which is free to alter in accordance with shifts in subject and mood, has been the most common for the English ode ever since; Wordsworth’s “ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807) is representative.

Some well-known odes Creeley’s “America,” Bernadette Mayer’s “ode on Periods,” and Robert Lowell’s “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket.”

Ode to Spring

Oh! Glorious Spring, how amazing you are   a

You are both Truth’s beauty and light             b

You travel far                                                        a

Yet always remain bright                                    b

Baby lambs greet you with a bleat                c

Birds fly stretching their wings                       d

Lovers on a seat                                                 c

We are truly thankful for what you bring      d

Spring never leave                                              e

Oh but can I compare                                        f

How I feel when you’re near?                          g

Spreading your joy to those so dear               g

Spring we celebrate your birth                        h

And we mourn each year you leave this earth   h

Oh spring!

Conclusion

In short, after this entire thing we can say that odes were a sort of spinoff from the ancient Greek aeidein, which translates to “singing” or “chanting.” In its earliest day, a poet’s ode was always accompanied by music and dance. Thus we can say that the form of Ode is also an important form of the verse. So overall we can say that ‘Ode is a form sometimes with rhymes, strophe, antistrophe, epode or sometimes not.’