Date: Tuesday, October 14
Time: 5:30 – 6:30 p.m.
Place: St. Agnes Branch Library, 444 Amsterdam Avenue (near 81st Street), 3rd Floor
Theme: Poetry and the Ode
Join the One Page Poetry Circle on October 14 to discuss Poetry and the Ode.
What is an ode? Basically it is a poem that expresses personal emotions while 
reflecting on a being or thing of significance to the poet. The ode is one of the oldest forms of poetry, and was originally a poem with a complex stanza form accompanied by music. Odes of the ancient Greeks contained a strophe, antistrophe, and epode which refer to the rhythmical patterns of the text. The strophe and the antistrophe were sung by the chorus on opposites sides of the stage, and the antistrophe provided a conclusion somewhere in the middle. The Pindaric ode consists of three sections with irregular line lengths and rhyme patterns and celebrated gods or events such as the Olympics. The Romans wrote odes as lyrical poems of a more personal nature. The Horatian ode is calmer and less formal than the Greek and not written for a stage performance. The more modern English or Irregular ode, written in a freer style, makes no attempt to follow the traditional form although it sometimes retains the three-part structure.
The ode was popular among British Romantic poets, who looked at the world and saw themselves. William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” contrasts his state of mind as a child with his current depression. Where once the world appeared to him with “the glory and the freshness of a dream,” he finds that those visions have fled and concludes:
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind
Although Wordsworth’s subject matter is modern in that he examines his own beliefs, he keeps the traditional structure of a contrast of two viewpoints and a resolution. More recent odes are often a celebration of an object, such as Max Mendelsohn’s “Ode to Marbles”:
I love the sound of marbles
scattered on the worn wooden floor,
like children running away in a game of hide-and-seek.
I love the sight of white marbles,
blue marbles,
green marbles, black,
new marbles, old marbles,
iridescent marbles,
with glass-ribboned swirls,
dancing round and round.
I love the feel of marbles,
cool, smooth,
rolling freely in my palm,
like smooth-sided stars
that light up the worn world.
In Mendelsohn’s ode the three-part structure celebrates the sound, sight, and feel of marbles.
To add a comment about odes, or post one you like, click the small speech balloon next to this blog post headline and follow the prompts. We look forward to your thoughts.
One Page Poetry Circle 
So many of the examples of odes are by men. Have women written odes? One of the most famous odes was written by the ancient Greek poet, Sappho. I came across this website of 32 translations of an ode of hers, “Poem of Jealousy” http://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/sappho.htm
This poem is a fragment that exists because it was quoted by the critic Longinus. In this poem the narrator watches a couple and expresses his or her feelings. There is a final line fragment stating that all must be endured that most translations have not included.
No odes by women poets come readily to mind. Here is Eliabeth Barrett Browning’s version of an ode by Anacreion (582 – 485 BCE):
Paraphrase on Anacreon: Ode to the Swallow
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1862)
Thou indeed, little Swallow,
A sweet yearly comer.
Art building a hollow
New nest every summer.
And straight dost depart
Where no gazing can follow.
Past Memphis, down Nile!
Ay! but love all the while
Builds his nest in my heart,
Through the cold winter-weeks:
And as one Love takes flight.
Comes another, O Swallow,
In an egg warm and white,
And another is callow.
And the large gaping beaks
Chirp all day and all night:
And the Loves who are older
Help the young and the poor Loves,
And the young Loves grown bolder
Increase by the score Loves—
Why, what can be done?
If a noise comes from one.
Can I bear all this rout of a hundred and more Loves?
Odes seem to me to be longer than one page, unless one prints them very tiny. But there are ‘little odes’ and ‘short odes’. Here is “Short Ode to the Cuckoo” by W. H. Auden (with an explanatory note added by Stephen Pentz http://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.com/2014/01/synonyms-for-joy.html ):
Short Ode to the Cuckoo
No one now imagines you answer idle questions
— How long shall I live? How long remain single?
Will butter be cheaper? — nor does your shout make
husbands uneasy.
Compared with arias by the great performers
such as the merle, your two-note act is kid-stuff:
our most hardened crooks are sincerely shocked by
your nesting habits.
Science, Aesthetics, Ethics, may huff and puff but they
cannot extinguish your magic: you marvel
the commuter as you wondered the savage.
Hence, in my diary,
where I normally enter nothing but social
engagements and, lately, the death of friends, I
scribble year after year when I first hear you,
of a holy moment.
W. H. Auden, Epistle to a Godson (1972).
“Merle” (line 6) is another name for the blackbird. The word has its origins in French, and the OED states that it is found “frequently in Scottish poetry from the 15th century onwards.” The references to the cuckoo’s “shout” making “husbands uneasy” (lines 3 and 4) and to its “nesting habits” (line 8) refer to the tendency of some species of cuckoo to take over the nests of other birds.