READING THE ODE

1.  So the ode, as a praise poem, probably emerged from the twinned forms of prayer and litany. Odes—here is a way to think about them—are about trying to get into right relation to an imagined good or power. Or, to say it the other way, they are about not being in possession of some desired good or power. If you were in possession of it, you wouldn’t need to address it.

2.  In this sense every love poem, every prayer, most descriptive poems, most poems that think through ideas (because the completed thought is the desired good) belong to the gesture of the ode. In this sense, “Western Wind” is a very short ode:

           O Western wind, when wilt thou blow?

           The small rain down doth rain.

           Christ! That my love were in my arms

           And I in my bed again!

And even this small, astonishing poem by Bashō, about not being in possession of what you are in possession of, is an ode:

               Even in Kyoto,

           Hearing the cuckoo’s cry

               I long for Kyoto.

3.  The ode is a request form, so it is a quest form, a motion-toward form, and it is therefore also inescapably a distance-from form, so that the membrane between ode and elegy, between desire and mourning, is in the best poems very permeable. That’s why Coleridge could call his poem “Dejection: An Ode.” Keats seems to have understood this very clearly in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale,” and it is what gives those poems—and the great “To Autumn”—their aching beauty. Probably the clearest statement of the case is Emily Dickinson’s “I Cannot Live with You,” a poem made of a litany of reasons why the lovers want each other too much to ever get together. It’s the poem that ends:

           So we must meet apart—

           You there—I—here

           With just the Door ajar

           That Oceans are—and Prayer—

           And that White Sustenance—

           Despair—

Which seems to say that in the end it is not the beloved object that is the good, it is desire, and therefore the very distance that the poem wants to traverse, that is the good.

Probably worth saying here that it is not always desire that initiates the ode. I remember being on a panel on poetics once with Seamus Heaney. I had quoted some of Robert Duncan’s great poem, “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow” in which Duncan writes about the source of his creativity being a place of “first permission” as an “everlasting omen of what is.” It’s not exactly automatic entry that he’s speaking of, but the provocation toward a place of speech. Seamus, listening, squinted and demurred, and remarked that a poem for him almost always began in dissent, by saying no. Which, I think, makes immediate sense. If we agreed with the world in all its particulars, we would be identical with it and have nothing to say. Thought begins in disagreement, the terms of which demand to be articulated. The heart or mind opened to something by longing, by a felt absence is surely one movement of the ode. Thinking one’s way out of an untenable place is another.

4.  And there are also goods, and virtues implicit in them, that are relatively attainable so that our distance from them is, mostly, habit. “The function of art,” Viktor Shklovsky, “is to make the stone stone and the grass grass by freeing us from the automatism of perception.” So Pablo Neruda on tomatoes and sox, and this poem by Bashō:

               A fall night,

           Getting dinner, we peeled

               Eggplants, cucumbers.

BACCYLIADES, POUND, AND THE GREEK ODE

5.  To begin to track this complex history, a place to start is the Greek ode. These poems were sung or recited, often in choral form, so they probably have some relation to the origins of drama, were perhaps danced, and thus have in their shape some ritual elements—some physical idea of how you dance toward or before the gods. Scholars describe them as having three movements—strophe, in which the chorus moved from left to right; antistrophe, in which they moved from right to left; and epode, in which the chorus stood still. Typically, the poets varied the meter in the three parts. From our point of view the thing to notice is the obvious thing—their aim is praise, they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Here’s an example from Baccylides, who was born on Ceos in the Cyclades about twenty-five hundred years ago. He was a younger contemporary of Pindar and was much admired in the ancient world. His poems disappeared altogether from the historical record—he survived as a name and a few scraps quoted by grammarians until fourteen of his odes were discovered in a papyrus in Egypt in 1896. Here is one of them—a victory ode to honor the winner of a chariot race in the Olympic games of 468. David Mulroy, the author of this translation, describes the poem as “containing all the standard ingredients: brief mention of the victory being commemorated, a mythical narrative indirectly related to the victory, and maxims that more or less tie the whole thing together.”

This poem celebrates the owner of the horses, Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse, who was a patron of poets. Why read this old oddity of another culture—a half-sung, half-danced version of an after-dinner speech at a sporting event? Well, we are looking at an old movement of the mind and of the formal imagination. The poem begins with praise and prayer. It moves to myth, that middle of the poem in which we can begin to ask what idea of development or transformation of a theme is at work. The myths and legends narrated in the middle of these odes were the common lore of their audience, the stories that bound them together. Scholars say they reach back in their motion to the Homeric hymns, the oldest extant Greek poems—called Homeric because they were written—and were recited before there was writing in which to record them—in Homer’s meter, dactylic hexameter. The origins of drama were probably in the ritual enacting of these stories, all ways of soliciting and accommodating the powers that they understood to rule their universe, or, in the case of this story by Baccyliades, of a legendary king’s relation to the gods.

Croesus, the hero of the poem’s narrative middle, was king of Lydia, famous for his fabulous wealth. Lydia—western Turkey—functioned as a buffer state between the Greek world and the power of the Persian empire. When Lydia fell to Persia a hundred years before this poem was written, the Persian king Cyrus placed Croesus and his family on a funeral pyre to be burned alive. This is the story as Herodotus tells it. In Baccyliades’s version, Croesus builds his own pyre to escape the humiliation of defeat, and his piety saves him.

The poem begins by addressing Clio, the muse associated with history and thus with memory and fame, and asks her to help him praise Demeter, the goddess of the fertility of nature whose cult was associated with Sicily (you can go online and find news of the discovery or her ancient temple there by archaeologists in 2012). Notice that, in the same breath, the poet celebrates the horses of Hiero, mentions his father, and lavishes praise on his prosperity. In this way it is very much a feudal poem, not so different in spirit and intent from the “great house” poems of the English Renaissance, celebrating the properties of the powerful landowners who were also the patrons of poets. And this beginning ends—we are on Olympus, not in Sicily—at the temple to Apollo and the sacred spring where visitors purified and refreshed themselves before presenting their petitions to the god.

           Sing, O generous Clio, the praise

           of fertile Sicily’s queen,

           Demeter, her violet-wreathed girl, and Hiero’s

           swift Olympian horses;

           driven by Triumph and excellent Victory,

           they flashed by the turbulent Alpheus

           and placed the winner’s garlands in the hands

           of Deinomenes’ fortunate son.

           The people shouted, “Thrice

           happy man!

           who obtained from Zeus

           the Greeks’ widest rule

           and knows better than to cloak his towering

           wealth in darkness.”

           Precincts teem with sacrificial processions,

           streets with hospitable feasts.

           Gold glimmers amid rays

           from graven tripods standing

           in front of the temple, where Delphians care for

           Phoebus’ greatest shrine

           by the Castalian foundation. Glorify God!

           That is the crown of prosperity.

The transition to the story of Croesus depends on this, this and the association of Lydia with the taming of wild horses. Hiero’s victory is imagined to inspire processions to the temple of Apollo and “the man who led horse-taming / Lydia’s hosts / when Zeus brought / the destined crisis to pass / and Sardis fell to the Persian army, Croesus was saved by Apollo.” It is a poet’s transition—on the thinnest of pretexts, but it allows Baccyliades to tell the edifying and entertaining story of how Apollo snatched the king and his family from the flames:

           For the man who led horse-taming

           Lydia’s hosts,

           when Zeus brought

           the destined crisis to pass

           and Sardis fell to the Persian army—

           Croesus was saved by Apollo,

           god of the golden sword. That unexpected

           day of grief, deciding

           not to abide slavery, he built

           a pyre facing the bronze

           wall of his courtyard. With his virtuous wife

           and daughters, who sobbed and tore

           their elegant braids, he mounted, raised

           his hands to the distant sky

           and cried: “Overpowering deity,

           where is the gods’

           gratitude? Where

           is Leto’s lordly son?

           Alyattes’ palace has fallen. . . .

           [Two lines are missing.]

           The gold-bearing Pactolus is red

           with blood, women are led away

           from stately chambers to humiliation.

           The hated is loved; death is sweetest.”

           He spoke and ordered his fastidious

           servant to light the wood. The maidens

           screamed and threw their hands

           on their mother. Death foreseen

           is bitterest for mortals,

           but the fire no sooner

           started to blaze than Zeus

           positioned a cloud overhead and quenched

           the golden flame.

           Believe the will of the gods incapable

           of nothing! Apollo transported

           the elderly man to the Hyperboreans and settled him

           there with his slim-ankled daughters

           in return for sending mankind’s greatest

           gifts to holy Pytho.

End of the story. A story about right relation to the gods—a traditional piety, it would seem. Here is where Baccyliades takes his audience at the end of the poem:

           Not one of Hellas’ lords, O most

           praiseworthy Hiero, would dare

           to claim he has sent more

           gold to Loxias.

           [Loxias is one of Apollo’s names.]

           For one not fat

           with envy it is easy to praise

           a horse-loving martial man.

           [Six lines are missing.]

           . . . The lord Apollo

           said to the son of Pheres: “A mortal,

           you must be firm in two

           convictions: that tomorrow’s sun

           is the last you will see

           and that you will live

           in luxury for fifty years.”

           Take pleasure in holy works,

           the highest profit.

           To the wise my words have meaning: the sky

           is undefiled; the sea’s water

           does not decay and gold is joy,

           but a man may not cast off

           gray age and recover the bloom

           of youth. Virtue’s sheen

           never fades away like the body’s;

           the Muse preserves it, Hiero,

           and yours are the finest flowers

           of wealth. Silence

           is not success’

           ornament. By truth will live

           the tale of your glories and the gift of the sweet-tongued

           nightingale of Ceos.

           (David Mulroy, Early Greek Lyric Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 1992)

At this distance a string of platitudes. But a very interesting turn in the platitudes. From the idea that Croesus was saved by his piety to the idea that only poetry can immortalize virtue. Gold is not power, then, poetry is power. You can see now why the poem begins with Clio, the muse who presides over fame. Funniest and oddest is that Baccyliades ends by praising himself to Hiero. It’s a description associated with him in antiquity. He was “the sweet-tongued nightingale of Ceos.” And in this way it turns out to be—like “Ode to a Nightingale”—a poem about mortality and imagination.

6.  If you are inclined to think of this use of the narrative middle as antique, consider Ezra Pound’s “Canto II.” It’s another poem that falls fairly easily into three parts. I am not going to try to explicate the poem, but look, briefly, at how it begins. Pound doesn’t address Clio, the muse of history, but he does address a mentor figure, Browning, and speaks of his envy and dismay at Browning’s narrative poem, “Sordello.” There’s the poem, there’s Browning interpretation of the old poet, there’s Pound’s interpretation, there’s an extant scrap of a biography. The question of how you get at the real is transformed into an image of an old Chinese philosopher churning in the sea of the changeable world—which takes Pound to what he was great at, a flow of marine imagery, that calls up the story of Helen of Troy, that calls up many stories glimpsed in the waves, myth-stories that have been a human way of taking meaning from the changeable world, from the “blue-gray glass of the wave”:

           HANG it all, Robert Browning,

           there can be but the one “Sordello.”

           But Sordello, and my Sordello?

           Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.

           So-shu churned in the sea.

           Seal sports in the spray-whited circles of cliff-wash,

           Sleek head, daughter of Lir,

                    eyes of Picasso

           Under black fur-hood, lithe daughter of Ocean;

           And the wave runs in the beach-groove:

           “Eleanor, ἑλέναυς and ἑλέπτολις!”

                    And poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,

           Ear, ear for the sea-surge, murmur of old men’s voices:

           “Let her go back to the ships,

           Back among Grecian faces, lest evil come on our own,

           Evil and further evil, and a curse cursed on our children,

           Moves, yes she moves like a goddess

           And has the face of a god

                    and the voice of Schoeney’s daughters,

           And doom goes with her in walking,

           Let her go back to the ships,

           back among Grecian voices.”

           And by the beach-run, Tyro,

           Twisted arms of the sea-god,

           Lithe sinews of water, gripping her, cross-hold,

           And the blue-gray glass of the wave tents them,

           Glare azure of water, cold-welter, close cover.

           Quiet sun-tawny sand-stretch,

           The gulls broad out their wings,

                    nipping between the splay feathers;

           Snipe come for their bath,

                    bend out their wing-joints,

           Spread wet wings to the sun-film,

           And by Scios,

                    to left of the Naxos passage,

           Naviform rock overgrown,

                    algæ cling to its edge,

           There is a wine-red glow in the shallows,

                    a tin flash in the sun-dazzle.

And here Pound comes to the myth-narrative. This is a story from Ovid (the Roman descendant of the myth tradition that passed through the Homeric hymns to Pindar and Baccyliades to the Greek tragic poets). It’s one of those stories that must have derived from the physical look of a place, in this case “naviform rock / overgrown with algae.” A small island that looked like a ship, from which grew the story of the kidnapping of Dionysus. Pirates stopping for water found the boy-god and seized him, thinking to sell him into slavery. And the god appeared in the boy, accompanied by his panthers, and covered the ships with his vines through “god-sleight,” as the narrator of the story, an old sailor named Acoetes tells it, and turned the sailors into fish. It is a cautionary tale about messing with the god or pirating the fertility of the earth, told by the old sailor as a sort of inset Browningesque dramatic monologue:

           The ship landed in Scios,

                    men wanting spring-water,

           And by the rock-pool a young boy loggy with vine-must,

                    “To Naxos? Yes, we’ll take you to Naxos,

           Cum’ along lad.” “Not that way!”

           “Aye, that way is Naxos.”

                    And I said: “It's a straight ship.”

           And an ex-convict out of Italy

                    knocked me into the fore-stays,

           (He was wanted for manslaughter in Tuscany)

                    And the whole twenty against me,

           Mad for a little slave money.

                    And they took her out of Scios

           And off her course . . .

                    And the boy came to, again, with the racket,

           And looked out over the bows,

                    and to eastward, and to the Naxos passage.

           God-sleight then, god-sleight:

                    Ship stock fast in sea-swirl,

           Ivy upon the oars, King Pentheus,

                    grapes with no seed but sea-foam,

           Ivy in scupper-hole.

           Aye, I, Acœtes, stood there,

                    and the god stood by me,

           Water cutting under the keel,

           Sea-break from stern forrards,

                    wake running off from the bow,

           And where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk,

           And tenthril where cordage had been,

                    grape-leaves on the rowlocks,

           Heavy vine on the oarshafts,

           And, out of nothing, a breathing,

                    hot breath on my ankles,

           Beasts like shadows in glass,

                    a furred tail upon nothingness.

           Lynx-purr, and heathery smell of beasts,

                    where tar smell had been,

           Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,

                    eye-glitter out of black air.

           The sky overshot, dry, with no tempest,

           Sniff and pad-foot of beasts,

                    fur brushing my knee-skin,

           Rustle of airy sheaths,

                    dry forms in the æther.

           And the ship like a keel in ship-yard,

                    slung like an ox in smith's sling,

           Ribs stuck fast in the ways,

                    grape-cluster over pin-rack,

                    void air taking pelt.

           Lifeless air become sinewed,

                    feline leisure of panthers,

           Leopards sniffing the grape shoots by scupper-hole,

           Crouched panthers by fore-hatch,

           And the sea blue-deep about us,

                    green-ruddy in shadows,

           And Lyæus: “From now, Acœtes, my altars,

           Fearing no bondage,

                    fearing no cat of the wood,

           Safe with my lynxes,

                    feeding grapes to my leopards,

           Olibanum is my incense,

                    the vines grow in my homage.”

           The back-swell now smooth in the rudder-chains,

           Black snout of a porpoise

                    where Lycabs had been,

           Fish-scales on the oarsmen.

                    And I worship.

           I have seen what I have seen.

                    When they brought the boy I said:

           “He has a god in him,

                    though I do not know which god.”

           And they kicked me into the fore-stays.

           I have seen what I have seen:

                    Medon’s face like the face of a dory,

           Arms shrunk into fins. And you, Pentheus,

           Had as well listen to Tiresias, and to Cadmus,

           or your luck will go out of you.

           Fish-scales over groin muscles,

           lynx-purr amid sea . . .

That’s one story coming up out of the flux, the metamorphoses that Ovid described, and gazing into the sea, he conjures another:

           And of a later year,

                    pale in the wine-red algæ,

           If you will lean over the rock,

                    the coral face under wave-tinge,

           Rose-paleness under water-shift,

                    Ileuthyeria, fair Dafne of sea-bords,

           The swimmer’s arms turned to branches,

           Who will say in what year,

                    fleeing what band of tritons,

           The smooth brows, seen, and half seen,

                    now ivory stillness.

And this finishes the middle of the poem and returns us at the end to the opening theme:

           And So-shu churned in the sea, So-shu also,

                    using the long moon for a churn-stick . . .

           Lithe turning of water,

                    sinews of Poseidon,

           Black azure and hyaline,

                    glass wave over Tyro,

           Close cover, unstillness,

                    bright welter of wave-cords,

           Then quiet water,

                    quiet in the buff sands,

           Sea-fowl stretching wing-joints,

                    splashing in rock-hollows and sand-hollows

           In the wave-runs by the half-dune;

           Glass-glint of wave in the tide-rips against sunlight,

                    pallor of Hesperus,

           Grey peak of the wave,

                    wave, colour of grape’s pulp,

           Olive grey in the near,

                    far, smoke grey of the rock-slide,

           Salmon-pink wings of the fish-hawk

                    cast grey shadows in water,

           The tower like a one-eyed great goose

                    cranes up out of the olive-grove,

           And we have heard the fauns chiding Proteus

                    in the smell of hay under the olive-trees,

           And the frogs singing against the fauns

                    in the half-light.

           And . . .

In this case right relation to nature is, it would seem, an eye to beauty and an imagination open to the myth-world.

HORACE

7.  Horace published—I am a little hazy about what constituted publication during the reign of Caesar Augustus—four books of poems that have come down to us as odes. Horace himself called his poems carmina, “songs” in Latin. Later editors—probably in the Alexandrian period—called them odes, “songs” in Greek, but the poems were completely unrelated to the kind of formal, celebratory odes that Pindar and Baccyliades wrote. So later poets and historians tended to distinguish between the formal, or Pindaric, ode, and the informal and Horation ode. John Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” is a formal ode. Pablo Neruda’s “To a Watermelon” is an informal ode. The odes of Keats, the middle- and late-eighteenth-century odes by poets you may or may not have read or heard of—Mark Akenside, William Collins, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, Charlotte Smith—are probably mixed cases. And Horace himself complicates the issue, because his books of songs include all sorts of poems, basically lyric poems on a wide range of subjects, that adapted the meters of early Greek poetry—of Sappho and Alcaeus—which got passed to the world through the schoolroom as odes.

Thus an Oxford University Press book on the ode by John Heath-Stubbs begins, “The term ‘ode,’ as applied to English poems, is, I suspect, a not infrequent source of puzzlement to the student.” One English critic of the nineteenth century tried to settle the matter by saying that Horace’s poems were not so much a genre as a flavor. Simplest to look at a couple of poems and at the way they passed into English. Early on in Horace’s experiments with Greek meters, Rome received the news of the defeat of Mark Antony and the death of Cleopatra, a moment of Roman triumph, Horace wrote a poem, as if ripped from the headlines, that came to be called the Cleopatra ode:

           At last the day has come for celebration,

           For dancing and for drinking, bringing out

           The couches with their images of gods

           Adorned in preparation for the feast.

           Before today it would have been wrong to call

           For the festive Caecuban wine from the vintage bins,

           It would have been wrong while that besotted queen,

           With her vile gang of sick polluted creatures,

           Crazed with hope and drunk with her past successes,

           Was planning the death and destruction of the empire.

           But, comrades, she came to and sobered up

           When not one ship, almost, of all her fleet

           Escaped unburned, and Caesar saw to it

           That she was restored from the madness to a state

           Of realistic terror. The way a hawk

           Chases a frightened dove or as a hunter

           Chases a hare across the snowy steppes,

           His galleys chased this fleeing queen, intending

           To put the monster prodigy into chains

           And bring her back to Rome. But she desired

           A nobler fate than that; she did not seek

           To hide her remnant fleet in a secret harbor;

           Nor did she, like a woman, quail with fear

           At the thought of what the dagger does.

           She grew more fierce as she beheld her death.

           Bravely, as if unmoved, she looked upon

           The ruins of her palace; bravely reached out,

           And touched the poison snakes, and picked them up,

           And handled them, and held them to her so

           Her heart might drink its fill of their black venom.

           In truth—no abject woman she—she scorned

           In triumph to be brought in galleys unqueened

           Across the seas to Rome to be a show.

The striking thing about the poem, of course, is that it begins in what seems like patriotic gloating and ends in something like a celebration not of Roman victory but of the grandeur of the Egyptian queen’s pride and defiance. So it is indeed a praise poem, but it celebrates the vanquished, not the victor. The first two stanzas do the Pindaric celebrating, the middle of the poem tells the story of Octavian’s success, and then veers, at the end of the fifth stanza in David Ferry’s translation, to Cleopatra’s point of view. A three-part structure of almost sonnetlike proportions, with the turn about two-thirds of the way through. Commentators have attended to the meter: this is an epic subject, but it doesn’t get the treatment Horace’s contemporary Varus would have given it—a full-fledged Homeric hexameter. He writes it in the meter of a love song by Sappho.

8.  You would not think this poem, so rooted in its circumstances, would have suggested a way forward for the ode, but it did, for at least one poet. Andrew Marvell, a poet of Puritan sympathies politically, mimicked Horace’s method—and the poised irony of his means—in a poem about Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan military leader in the English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century that led to the arrest and beheading of the king, Charles I, and the establishment of the Commonwealth with Cromwell as its Lord Protector. After disposing of Charles, Cromwell set about subjugating the Roman Catholic Irish with his Puritan troops. Marvell entitled his poem “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.” Horace had suggested an ironic treatment of the praise poem and Marvell jumped on it. I won’t reproduce the whole poem here. You can find it easily. But it begins like this:

           The forward youth that would appear

           Must now forsake his Muses dear,

                    Nor in the shadows sing

                    His numbers languishing.

           ’Tis time to leave the books in dust,

           And oil th’ unused armour’s rust,

                    Removing from the wall

                    The corslet of the hall.

           So restless Cromwell could not cease

           In the inglorious arts of peace,

                    But thorough advent’rous war

                    Urged his active star.

Looks like a straightforward call to heroic arms, if you do not read too closely. But very shortly one notices the way the active man is “forward” and wants to “appear,” and the slightly comic Don Quixote–ish idea of dusting off and oiling up the armor, and that phrase “the inglorious arts of peace.” And one would notice also the way the meter of the poem gives a slightly mocking edge to its heroics. Two lines of tetrameter, followed by two lines of trimeter, four beats and then three, expand contract, and lock the lines together with a jangling couplet rhyme. It ends like this:

           But thou, the war’s and fortune’s son,

           March indefatigably on;

                    And for the last effect

                    Still keep thy sword erect;

           Besides the force it has to fright

           The spirits of the shady night,

                    The same arts that did gain

                    A pow’r, must it maintain.

This echoes the truism about living by the sword and might remind some readers of the moral world of Macbeth. You can feel the way “the spirits of the shady night” might lead a man who has hazarded his fortune on power and so made enemies to tighten his grip on his sword.

I see the structure of the poem as having five parts—the introductory stanzas, the portrait of Cromwell and the question of the morality and legality of the war (which assumes blandly that power is right), the portrait of Charles’s execution in the middle of the poem—an extraordinary bit of writing, and then the account of the bloody Irish campaign, and then the conclusion. Orderly, deft, judicious, skeptical. And suggests what might have been an unexpected direction for the prayer and the praise poem, that it could evolve into an instrument of assessment.

9.  Here is another kind of poem by Horace that came to be associated with the ode. The translation is mine:

           You talk very well about Inachus

           And how Codrus died for the city,

           And the offspring of old Aeacus

           And the fighting at sacred Ilium under the walls.

           But on the price of Chian wine,

           And the question of who’s going to warm it,

           Under whose roof it will be drunk,

           And when my bones will come unfrozen, you are mute.

           Boy, let’s drink to the new moon’s silver

           And drink to the middle of the night, and drink

           To good Murena with three glasses

           Or with nine. Nine, says the madman poet

           Whom the muses love, Three

           Should do nicely for a party,

           Says the even-tempered grace who holds

           Her naked sisters by the hands

           And disapproves altogether of brawling.

           But what I want’s to rave. Why is the flute

           From Phrygia silent? Why are the lyre

           And the reed pipe hanging on the wall?

           Oh, how I hate a pinching hand.

           Scatter the roses! Let jealous old Lycus

           Listen to our pandemonium,

           And also the pretty neighbor he’s not up to.

           Rhoda loves your locks, Telephus.

           She thinks they glisten like the evening star.

           As for me, I’m stuck on Glycera:

           With a love that smolders in me like slow fire.

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.

The middle of Jonson’s poem treats a menu as a litany, and, having begun with a petition, it ends with a promise:

           Nor shall our cups make any guilty men,

               But at our parting we will be as when

           We innocently met. No simple word

               That shall be uttered at our mirthful board

           Shall make us sad next morning, or affright

               The liberty that we’ll enjoy tonight.

Jonson’s liberty and Horace’s slow-burning fire. Mirroring opposites of the way the small ode establishes value.

EDMUND SPENSER AND THE HIGH RENAISSANCE

11.    Ornamental form in the Renaissance: Let’s look at fertility and the ode from another angle. Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” is a particular kind of ode—a wedding song. I don’t know what his models were. The great classical epithalamion is Catullus’s, which was apparently an imitation of one by Sappho, but Catullus wasn’t available to Spenser. The formal imagination in the Elizabethan period—think of their love of intricate designs. The epithalamion is twenty-four stanzas long, with a gorgeous, echoing rhyme scheme. Its form mimes a wedding ceremony. It begins with a processional and the classic praising of and calling down blessings from the appropriate gods and goddesses. Here’s the interesting thing about the structure. The bride’s arrival at the altar occurs in the exact center of the poem. The last eleven stanzas follow her away from that moment—so that the first stanza echoes the last, the second stanza the second to last, and so on. It’s organized as a series of concentric circles around the central event, vibrations that mimic the sound motif in the repeated refrain: “that all the woods may answer and your echo ring.” An example of making a spatial form out of the temporal form of the poem.

JOHN DONNE AND THE MEDITATIVE LYRIC

12.    Form and the meditative lyric: Probably these seventeenth-century devotional poems—rooted in English Christian prayer, in what I’ve come to think of as Protestant interiority (the need to examine the condition of one’s soul to see if one is saved or damned, to know the presence or the absence of God’s blessing)—are the implicit models for the entire development of English and American poetry. I think the romantic ode and much of the interiority of twentieth-century English language poetry begins here. There is a famous study of the origins of structure—of the work of the formal imagination—in the poetry of these years. Partly—famously—it begins with the transfer of subject from the Italianate love sonnet to the devotional sonnet. In a lot of the sonnets there is a certain amount of bravado play with rhetoric and with argument. In others, as in the great dramatic soliloquies of the same era, there is something like the invention of a profound and complex interiority, a fully rounded psychology of the person. But that new interiority is married in these poems to traditions of Christian prayer or prayer-behavior, which took the form of meditation. The classic study of this tradition is Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation.

13.    First of all, the aims of meditation.

“Meditation, which we treate of, is nothing els but a diligent and forcible application of the understanding, to seeke, and knowe, and as it were to taste some divine matter.”

(Richard Gibbons, 1611)

“Meditation: in which our mynd, not as a flie, by a simple musing, nor yet as a locust, to eat and be filled, but as a sacred Bee flies amongst the flowres of the holy mysteries, to extract from them the honie of Divine Love.”

(St. Francis De Sales, 1616)

14.    These come from the numerous treatises in the period on how to meditate, and they all propose in various ways a formal order for the practice that, as Martz points out, is reflected in the organization of devotional poetry. Not surprising, when you think about it. They were all priests. They were educated in this spiritual tradition. The method entailed “a regular sequence of beginning, middle, and end: preparatory steps; meditation proper, divided into ‘points’; followed by ‘colloquies,’ in which the soul speaks intimately with God and expresses its affections, resolutions, thanksgivings and petitions.” The preparatory prayer—like the addresses to the muse or to memory or to gods and goddesses in classical poetry—is “a short simple prayer for grace in the proper performance of the exercise.”

15.    Brief aside. What if there is no one or nothing to pray to? Consider Rilke, at the beginning of the Duino Elegies: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the host of angels?”

16.    Aside on the aside. Rilke’s elegies are one of the great modernist suites of odes. The term elegy in German literature refers to the meter in which the poems were written—the classical elegiac meter of alternating ten and twelve syllable lines. Studying beginning, middle, and ending in this tradition would be another way into the work of the formal imagination in romantic and modernist odes. A place to start would be one of Goethe’s Roman Elegies and then a couple of poems by Hölderlin, his “Bread and Wine” or “Homecoming,” and then one of the Duino Elegies. What they aim at, how they propose beginning, middle, and end. Useful book: Theodore Ziolkowski, The Classical German Elegy.

17.    Back to the seventeenth century. After the introductory prayer, the meditator was asked to perform—here’s Martz: “the famous ‘composition of place, seeing the spot’—a practice of enormous importance for religious poetry.” And he quotes the English Jesuit Gibbons on the need to see “the places where the things we meditate on were wrought, by imagining our selves to be really present at those places; which we must endeavor to represent so lively, as though we saw them indeed with our corporeal eyes; which to performe well, it will help us much to behould before-hande some Image wherein that myistery is represented.”

18.    This is the work of imagination. Martz tracks it from the spiritual practice of the metaphysical poets to Coleridge. Here is Coleridge in the Literaria Biographia: “The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into the activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity. He diffuses a tone and spirit of unity, that blends and, as it were, fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.” And from Coleridge to Wallace Stevens, in this passage from “Credences of Summer”:

           Three times the concentrated self takes hold, three times

           The thrice concentrated self, having possessed

           The object, grips it in savage scrutiny.

           Once to make captive, once to subjugate,

           Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim

           The meaning of the capture, this hard prize,

           Fully made, fully apparent, fully found.

19.    The treatises track the form of meditation to their understanding of what they called the three powers of the soul: memory, or imagemaking power; understanding; and will. They even argued “that the three powers of the soul were analogous to the Trinity, and that through the integration of this trinity within man he might come to know and feel in himself the operation of the higher Trinity.” It made a kind of map or guide to the inward journey toward communion with the good.

20.    An instance:

           Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

           Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,

           Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is,

           And as the other spheres, by being grown

           Subject to foreign motions, lose their own,

           And being by others hurried every day,

           Scarce in a year their natural form obey;

           Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit

           For their first mover and are whirled by it,

           Hence is’t, that I am carried toward the West

           This day, when my soul’s form bends towards the East.

Martz notices this careful ten-line setup and the way it corresponds to “composition of place” at the outset of meditation. From our point of view, it seems to mix the two initiating motives of this kind of poem—desire and discrepancy. It’s about wanting to be in right relation to the suffering god and the holy day and it’s about heading in the wrong direction, which initiates one of Donne’s most famous metaphors as the dramatic awakening of thought. In the Ptolemaic universe, subspheres and retrograde motion were required to maintain that all movements in the heaven’s consisted of perfect circles.

And there is something poignant in the connection between this theme and the poem’s form—the way couplet rhyme, which should express unison, harmony, feels jarring since the speaker feels that he, whether the heavens are or not, is out of tune. Next comes the powerful middle:

           There I should see a Sun, by rising, set,

           And by that setting endless day beget;

           But that Christ on this cross did rise and fall,

           Sin had eternally benighted all.

           Yet dare I almost be glad I do not see

           That spectacle of too much weight for me.

           Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die,

           What a death were it then to see God die;

           It made his own lieutenant, Nature, shrink;

           It made his footstool crack, and the sun wink,

           Could I behold those hands that span the poles,

           And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes?

           Could I behold the endless height which is

           Zenith to us, and to our antipodes,

           Humbled below us? Or that blood which is

           The seat of all our souls, if not of His,

           Make dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn

           By God, for his apparel, ragg’d and torn?

           If on these things I durst not look, durst I

           Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,

           Who was God’s partner here, and furnished thus

           Half of that sacrifice which ransomed us?

This is the middle, where the meditation, or the praise poem, or the lyric, or for that matter the elegy does its work of transformation. It’s easy to feel in this poem the movement of the three-part structure though one might want to describe it a little differently from the way Louis Martz does. Donne, it would seem, begins with his intelligence. The work of the middle of the poem is calling his mind to the story of the Crucifixion in a way that moves the heart. It’s also striking that implicit in the middle of this poem, as in the Greek odes, is the story of a god, in this case the Christian man-god, and the Christian story that human behavior called God down out of heaven to submit to torture and death as a form of ransom in that age of animal sacrifice. It’s a story about a transformation and vividly taking it into the understanding is the poem’s work of transformation. At which point, we come to the third part, which is prayer:

           Though these things, as I ride, be from my eye,

           They’re present yet unto my memory,

           For that looks towards them, and thou lookst towards me,

           O Savior, as thou hang’st upon the tree.

           I turn my back to thee but to receive

           Corrections, till they mercies bid thee leave.

           O think me worth thine anger; punish me;

           Burn off my rusts and my deformity;

           Restore thine image so much, by thy grace,

           That thou may’st know me, and I’ll turn my face.

The three-part structure, the sometimes enjambed and sometimes not play of the two-line couplets, it’s easy to see this as the formal work the poem is doing, and, of course, they don’t account for the surprising ways the metaphors develop, or the play between the torn body and the god-face, or the arrival of the poem at the suffering mother, or—however repellent to a secular reader the theology might seem—the way the mix of intellectual invention, of wit, really, and rhythmic force, and intense feeling, give the poem such a grave beauty.

I am trying to make a sinuous, Nabokovian path through this thicket of literary history. Here is where I walk around the poets of the middle and late eighteenth century who revived the ode.

ROMANTIC ODE AND ROMANTIC LYRIC

21.    Odes, Horation and Pindaric, got written throughout the seventeenth century and were revived big-time in the latter part of the eighteenth. There are books on this history, and some very good poems. I want to skip ahead to the romantic ode and to the early-nineteenth-century version of the meditative lyric. There’s a critical touchstone for these poems, an essay entitled “Style and Structure in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” published by M. H. Abrams a half a century ago. Abrams describes a typical movement in the poems of the period: that they often begin by setting a scene—from our point of view the initiatory stirring of desire or disturbance. “Five years have passed,” Wordsworth begins “Tintern Abbey.” “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” Keats begins the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Abrams observes that the poems then move inward, taking speaker and reader on a reflective journey, “a varied but integral process,” he writes, “of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling,” and that the poems tend to end where they began with some sense that, “on arrival, the place where they began has been altered.” Later critics would find a pattern of conflict, dealing with the conflict, resolving the conflict way too pat. But some notion of disturbance, a turn inward to explore its source or meaning, and a reorientation toward it corresponds in interesting ways to the movement of seventeenth-century poems. It also connects to what Hölderlin described as “innerlichkeit,” the vast interior sea of human inwardness, to navigate which he understood to be the task of poets.

22.    Thinking of Hölderlin’s “Der Spaziergang.” The movement of several of his poems involves taking a walk, or climbing a mountain to a place where the mind can get hold of the vista onto human life. And this connects to the topographical poems of the English seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that were said to have helped form the impulse of the romantic lyric.

23.    Here’s an instance of this inward journey. One of the great ones, I think, Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”:

           The Frost performs its secret ministry,

           Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry

           Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.

           The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

           Have left me to that solitude, which suits

           Abstruser musings: save that at my side

           My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

           ’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

           And vexes meditation with its strange

           And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,

           This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood

           With all the numberless goings-on of life,

           Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame

           Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;

           Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

           Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.

           Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature

           Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,

           Making it a companionable form,

           Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit

           By its own moods interprets, every where

           Echo or mirror seeking of itself,

           And makes a toy of Thought.

                                But O! how oft,

           How oft, at school, with most believing mind,

           Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,

           To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft

           With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt

           Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower,

           Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang

           From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,

           So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me

           With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

           Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

           So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt,

           Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!

           And so I brooded all the following morn,

           Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye

           Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:

           Save if the door half opened, and I snatched

           A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,

           For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face,

           Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,

           My play-mate when we both were clothed alike!

                    Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

           Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

           Fill up the intersperséd vacancies

           And momentary pauses of the thought!

           My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

           With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

           And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,

           And in far other scenes! For I was reared

           In the great city, pent ’mid cloisters dim,

           And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.

           But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze

           By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags

           Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,

           Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores

           And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear

           The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible

           Of that eternal language, which thy God

           Utters, who from eternity doth teach

           Himself in all, and all things in himself.

           Great universal Teacher! he shall mould

           Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

                    Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

           Whether the summer clothe the general earth

           With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

           Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

           Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

           Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

           Heard only in the trances of the blast,

           Or if the secret ministry of frost

           Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

           Quietly shining to the quiet moon.

Four blank verse stanzas, and the habitual three-pulse form. The first stanza is the meditative setup, the composition of place in Louis Martz’s terms. The last stanza is the conclusion. The remarkable middle stanzas—in Abrams’s terms, the inward journey—is worth attending to closely.

Think of it this way. Their culture and traditions gave the Greek writers of ode their form and the content of their form. The vocative address at the beginning of their poems comes to them from their sense of the powers that govern nature and the mind. They knew what divinities to solicit for what purpose because they’d received a mythology, which is to say a sophisticated narrative elaboration of an animist, polytheist sense of the universe. The middle parts of their poems, the storytelling that dips into the wealth of mythic lore, belong to their sense, an oral tradition’s sense of the archival and genealogical function of poetry. And the conclusion, the petition, came from an understanding of power relations in their social world. You ask favors of power and give it in return the gift of praise and, if you are a poet, of the immortality that praise confers.

The Christian poets of the seventeenth century had a similar map, a monotheist (more or less) map of whom to address, a process of bringing the faculties of the mind to bear, based on medieval understandings of the functions of the mind, and a theologically appropriate form of petition.

My sense is that beginning in the late eighteenth century in European cultures, poets were beginning not to have such a map. They understood that the deities they were invoking were a literary fiction. And what exactly they were trying to get in right relation to was often not very clear to them either. What Wordsworth and Coleridge had was not the Aristotelian categories of mental activities so much, perhaps, as the developing tradition of British empiricism, the mind described by John Locke and David Hartley was some combination of constructive and impressionable, and knowledge was derived not so much from reason but from the association of ideas rising from sense experience—“the mighty world of eye and ear,” Wordsworth would call it in “Tintern Abbey,” “both what they half create, and what perceive.” I imagine that this notion was liberating, and intended to be liberating, the tabula rasa from which a new look at things could occur.

But the poet, as a result, had no map for the interior journey for what was to be the transformative middle of the meditative lyric. Or at least this would be a place from which to look at the way the formal imagination works in the poems of this period.

To watch this work in “Frost at Midnight,” you need one piece of information. Fires were the main source of heat in the house of this period, in stoves or in grates, and people must have spent a good deal of time staring into embers. And there was a tradition in English folklore—Coleridge made reference to it in a footnote to the poem—that if you looked hard into the embers of a fire, if an absent friend was going to visit you, you would see that friend. If there is a goddess invoked at the beginning of this poem, it is midnight quiet and the image of the fire at the end of the first stanza, which makes “the puny flaps and freaks” of the fire a companion spirit—even a tutelary spirit—for the mind—“the idling spirit”—which—notice—is seeking itself. It is itself, he says, the object of the hunt.

You’d have to know the poets of the late eighteenth century, especially Cowper, I imagine, to know how new this is, but it’s new. Notice the transition. The flutter in the grate reminds the speaker of his childhood. Biographical note. Coleridge was born into a large boisterous family. His father was a vicar and a schoolmaster in a small town. When his father died, he was sent to school as a scholarship boy in London. This is the source of the aching homesickness that the poem evokes. By association and the work of memory the fire in the grate returns him to childhood and his village life and the fires he stared into, looking for signs of a visitor, who is called, interestingly, the “stranger.” The longing for the stranger returns him to his village, and the village bells, a sound associated with a grand future. Then he tells us he remembers falling asleep in that dreamy state and waking to another schoolday and himself a boy pretending to study and yearning for, half expecting the arrival of “the stranger,” who is not imagined to be a stranger, but someone known from his former world—a townsman, or closer still an aunt, and closer still a sister. This is something like what Freud called “regression in the service of the ego.” Not just a sister, but “a sister more beloved, / my playmate when we both were clothed alike.” He’s gone back before gender.

And that makes the transition to the sleeping infant, whose breathing has been filling “the momentary pauses” in what he calls “thought,” which up to this point we would probably call reverie. And that leads him—Coleridge was twenty-seven when he wrote this poem, a young man and a very new father—back to his orphaned London childhood and forward to his imagination of his son’s very different childhood in close contact with the natural world, which is, he says, “that eternal language which thy God utters.” And then at the end of the paragraph we get the invocation to the deity, Nature’s God, the “great universal Teacher” who he says—he’s addressing the baby—“shall mold / Thy spirit and by giving make it ask.” So the idea of petition emerges at the end, not as an obligation but a gift.

And then comes the ending. It’s interesting that the end of the poem is not about union with the great Universal teacher. That union permits the future in which the child and vicariously the speaker will be in communion with the natural world, which is evoked in a few lines of the kind that Coleridge was brilliant at and didn’t write enough of—“while the nigh thatch / Smokes in the sun-thaw” is stunning and as near to union with nature as descriptive language can get. But the poem doesn’t end there either. It seems intent on the return that Abrams describes to the opening situation when “the eave-drops fall” from the roof edge or “the secret ministry of frost / Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon.”

All the commentators on the poem I’ve looked at connect the icicles reflecting the moonlight back to the moon to the mind seeking an “echo or mirror” of itself at the end of the first stanza. Something like Emerson’s transparent eyeball (which could have come from his reading of this poem). But my interest isn’t in interpreting the poem here, but to look at the way the ode structure is undergoing change. “Frost at Midnight” is my exemplary case, but it might have been “Tintern Abbey” or the more grand-scale odes like Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” or Coleridge’s “Dejection.” Inspections you can make for yourself. I wanted to call attention to this rivery movement in the verse of this period because it tracks a different sense of mind that anticipates both surrealism and the representation of the mind by stream of consciousness in fiction. It represents thought as something nearer to what we think of as imagination, a proceeding by intuitions having to do with likeness, with mirroring and echoing, with an oscillation between thought and sensation, discursive and mimetic modes. The capacities of mind are here—memory, the consciousness with which we experience a present, the imagination through which we create a future, the resemblances—“correspondences,” Charles Baudelaire called them, by which we seem to sense meaning, but all the orderly priorities of the theologians are gone. And that opens the way to many tactics of development in the quest poems of the twentieth century and also to the tactics of a postmodern skepticism about meaning—Derrida enters here among others—that understand the movement of the mind not as something that has points of arrival, but as something that circulates through stations recurrent enough for memory to give it an identity with itself.

24.    Keats and Endings: John Keats was twenty-five or twenty-six when he wrote his suite of six odes. They are perhaps the most studied and commented upon poems, after Shakespeare’s sonnets, in the English language. Here is a small exercise. Take an afternoon and reread Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and “Immortality Ode” and maybe one other Wordsworth ode or the first book of The Prelude and Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and his “Dejection: An Ode” and then read—written about twenty-two years later, the five Keats odes—“Psyche,” “Melancholy,” “Nightingale,” “Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.” I don’t know if you will share my experience of them, but I found that when reading them in that order, the striking thing about the Keats poems was that they seemed so beautifully finished and a little old-fashioned. It struck me that he had perfected the form of the eighteenth-century ode and—except for “Ode to a Nightingale”—had not really absorbed the challenging experiments with the interior journey of the poem that Wordsworth and Coleridge had been working out. I don’t mean to criticize them for not doing something they weren’t trying to do. They are gorgeous poems, of course, and formally radiant.

Look at “Psyche,” the earliest to be written: six stanzas, which divide neatly into three sets of two, beginning, middle, and end. The first stanza is twelve lines, the second eleven, the third twelve, the fourth fourteen, the last two eight and ten lines. They have the irregularity that the ode form licensed, a mild irregularity, and within the stanzas are varying line lengths, mostly iambic pentameter lines with a scattering of more songlike dimeter and trimeter lines and a varied rhyme patterning. It could hardly be more neatly done, and it’s a poem self-conscious about the antiquity of the ode. It begins by addressing the muse and claiming her as his audience for a description of a vision of Psyche in the arms of Eros:

           They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass:

               Their arms embraced, and their pinions too,

               Their lips touched not, but had not bid adieu;

           As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber

           And ready still past kisses to outnumber

(On the subject of odes: surely the passage in Whitman’s “Song of Myself” about the poet’s erotic relation to his soul is a denim-and-flannel version of the preceding scene in Keats:

           I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

           How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me,

           And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart

           And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

It’s the same allegorizing impulse of the eighteenth-century ode. And on the subject of Eros and Psyche, you should take a look at what Robert Duncan does with it and with the ode form in “Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar.”)

Of the poems that followed “Psyche,” “Ode on Melancholy” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn,” each have an even tighter formal arrangement. “Melancholy” is three ten-line stanzas with a fixed rhyme scheme, ababcdecde: each stanza is a curtailed sonnet. “Grecian Urn” uses the same stanza. It’s five stanzas. It begins with ode’s personification and address: “Thou still unravish’d bride.” And ends with it: “Thou, silent form dost tease us out of thought.” And the journey in the middle through the landscape of the vase is straightforward, a focused development of its central teasing idea. And the great “To Autumn” is three eleven-line stanzas, even more nearly a sequence of sonnets. Compared to them, the movement of “Ode to a Nightingale” seems much more complex. The turnings of mind from stanza to stanza are quite complicated. Take a look:

           Ode to a Nightingale

           1.

           My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

             My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

           Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

             One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

           ’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,

           But being too happy in thine happiness,—

             That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,

               In some melodious plot

           Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,

             Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

           2.

           O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been

             Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,

           Tasting of Flora and the country green,

             Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

           O for a beaker full of the warm South,

             Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

              With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

                   And purple-stained mouth;

           That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,

             And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

           3.

           Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget

             What thou among the leaves hast never known,

           The weariness, the fever, and the fret

             Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;

           Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,

             Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;

              Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

                   And leaden-eyed despairs,

           Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,

             Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

           4.

           Away! away! for I will fly to thee,

             Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,

           But on the viewless wings of Poesy,

             Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:

           Already with thee! tender is the night,

             And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,

              Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;

                   But here there is no light,

           Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

             Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

           5.

           I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,

             Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,

           But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet

             Wherewith the seasonable month endows

           The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

             White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

              Fast fading violets cover’d up in leaves;

                   And mid-May’s eldest child,

           The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,

             The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

           6.

           Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

             I have been half in love with easeful Death,

           Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

             To take into the air my quiet breath;

           Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

             To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

              While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

                   In such an ecstasy!

           Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

             To thy high requiem become a sod.

           7.

           Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

             No hungry generations tread thee down;

           The voice I hear this passing night was heard

             In ancient days by emperor and clown:

           Perhaps the self-same song that found a path

             Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,

              She stood in tears amid the alien corn;

                   The same that oft-times hath

           Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

             Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

           8.

           Forlorn! the very word is like a bell

             To toil me back from thee to my sole self!

           Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well

             As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.

           Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

             Past the near meadows, over the still stream,

              Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep

                   In the next valley-glades:

           Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

             Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

There are not quite numberless readings of where the bird’s song—the longing for something in the bird’s song—takes the poet in this poem. I’m not going to add to them here. From our point of view—trying to understand what has been the shape and impulse of the ode—the thing to notice is that it begins with an address to the bird that has been elicited by a paradoxical mix of fullness and emptiness in the bird’s song. What seems the nightingale’s pure happiness makes the speaker’s heart ache. One might locate the whole history of the form here in this mix of desire, prayer, a sense of lack or loss, a devotional reverence. And then the poem takes us on an interior journey in which the poet comes to inhabit the world of the bird’s song—“Already with thee! Tender is the night,” the famous line goes—and then in stanza six comes to understand his desire as an ecstatic longing for death, or a longing for death while experiencing ecstasy. (One of my students called it “the rock star stanza”—think Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain. Check out the elision between death and paradise in the disco songs evoked by D. A. Powell in his book Tea.) Keats had the reputation in the nineteenth century of being a sensuous poet but not a thinker. Now it would seem that an extraordinary complexity and subtlety of thinking about the nature of desire and imagination is packed into the seventh stanza, in which he begins to end the poem by addressing the bird again, which is no longer a summer bird but an idea about the immortality of art that puts us in touch with a desire that fuses a kind of existential homesickness with an imagination of other, more magical and perilous worlds. A compression of images that might work as a definition of the sublime. (Emily Dickinson read Keats and so did Rilke and Stevens.)

And then there is the end of the poem. If Keats did not reinvent the ode, he thought very hard in April and May of 1819 when he was writing these poems about how to end one. Traditionally they ended in a prayer or a solicitation of favor. The whole weight of literary expectation, of the consciously and unconsciously absorbed ideas that a writer has about how a poem should behave, would have—I would think, without reading through the history of the late-eighteenth-century poems in which the young Keats had soaked himself—been to arrive at some kind of sententious summing up, something like a moral precept or comforting truth about the relationship to the power addressed, and that seems to be what Keats was trying to imagine his way past. “Psyche” ends with an image of the ideal the poem courted:

           And there shall be for thee all soft delight

                    That shadowy thought can win,

           A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

                    To let the warm Love in!

A subjunctive, a wish fulfilled in imagination (like the wish in the little lyric “Western Wind” and in Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights”). If “Psyche” delivers the soul to love, “Melancholy” delivers it to melancholy, also in an almost allegorical image:

                    Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

           Can bust joy’s grape against his palate fine;

               His soul shall taste the sadness of her might

                    And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

They are both in their way moral summings up. In “Grecian Urn,” Keats seems to have tried to evade the impulse by distancing it:

                    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe,

           Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest,

               “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all

                    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

And in this way the ending of “Nightingale” is particularly surprising. The first line returns the poet from the voyage. The next set of lines untwines the bird as a metaphor for fancy and the bird as a bird and says good-bye to them both and ends, emptied of the music that initiated the poem, with a question.

           Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep?

Which I am inclined to take not as a question, not even as a rhetorical question, but as a statement of fact, as in Chuang Tzu’s famous remark that he didn’t know whether he was Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu. It is a description of the condition of being in the world. Which is how, it would seem, William Butler Yeats understood it when he borrowed Keats’s method to end his poem “Among Schoolchildren,” maybe the preeminent modernist ode:

           O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

           Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?

           O body swayed by music, O brightening glance,

           How can we know the dancer from the dance?

(It would seem in one reading to be an image of form itself, of the fusion of movement and stillness in a work of art.) And in “To Autumn,” he also ends with an image, but it is a different thing in kind from the images—eighteenth-century allegorical images—that end “Pysche” and “Melancholy.” It’s like watching the symbolist image from Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” passed into his hands as it gets passed on to the modernists:

           Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

           The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

               And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Lines, as many critics have remarked, that Wallace Stevens used as a model for the end of “Sunday Morning”:

           And in the isolation of the sky,

           At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make

           Ambiguous undulations as they sink

           Downward to darkness on extended wings.

25.    Mid-nineteenth Century: Walt Whitman is the great model in midcentury, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” And—for that matter—the great explosion of the ode form, “Song of Myself.” Helen Vendler in her very rich book on the odes of Keats proposed to read them—all six of them; she includes “Ode on Indolence”—as a single long poem about mortality and imagination. And in that way the Keats odes and “Song of Myself” might be read together as a way that the ode form opened up to the modernist long poem.

26.    Elsewhere in the Nineteenth Century: French Symbolist voyage poems and the ode. See Charles Baudelaire, “Invitation to a Voyage”; Arthur Rimbaud, “The Drunken Boat”; Stéphane Mallarmé, “A Throw of the Dice.”

27.    Modernism and the Ode Form: The first generation of twentieth-century poets in the English language were skittish about genre. Their starting place was the idea that the old forms needed to be renovated. Also the old values. So the modernist poem is often a quest form, initiated by a desire to name what it values. It’s not an accident that the Duino Elegies begins with the question of whom or what to address:

           Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ orders?

And because it is a quest form, it is haunted or informed by the ode, or at least by some hybrid of the formal inheritance we have been looking at of the classical odes, the seventeenth-century meditative poem, and the romantic odes. It’s clear, for example, that Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West” come out of the odes of Keats, that classical ideas of the ode hover behind many of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. And one could see many sections of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and his “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” that way, and the long poems of the war years, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and H. D.’s Trilogy, and study their formal shaping by asking what they address and how they develop and in what relation the endings of the poems stand to what desired goods they discover.

But let me suggest here looking at two poems, Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus” and Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” from his A Poet in New York. I won’t analyze their structures or their prosody. I will leave that to you. Marianne Moore hiked Mount Rainier with her brother in 1922. The title of the poem refers in a weird way to the glacier that grips the peak and the poem belongs to the genre of mountain odes—poems trying to get sublimity in their sights—that include the ascent of Mount Snowdon at the end of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” Friederich Schiller’s “The Walk,” and perhaps more specifically Hölderlin’s “Bread and Wine” and “The Rhine” in which the German poet associates the view from mountain heights with the sensibility of ancient Greece and its gods. It is a view with which the Scots-Irish and Presbyterian Moore seems to be in polemic at the end of “An Octopus.” One of the delicious things about this delicious poem is the way she comes to the subject of Greece. The poem is too expensive to reprint here (though it first appeared almost a hundred years ago) and readers should, ideally, consult Becoming Marianne Moore: The Early Poems, 1907–1924, where you will be able find the version of the poem published in The Dial in 1924 and in her book Observations also in that year, and compare it with the revised version in the Complete Poems of 1957, which is the version that is usually reprinted, for example in the 2003 Poems of Marianne Moore.

Most of the poem, as you will see, is a description, in her inimitably strange and beautiful patchwork of vivid description and quotation, of her ascent up the mountain. There are many things to marvel at in it, especially the way the poem does the ode’s work of praise by seeing what’s there with her entirely fresh and unexpected eye and also the way (1924? Was she mocking the use of allusion to high literature in Eliot and Pound?) she borrows passages from the National Park Service guidebook to the mountain and its trails. The Park Service was created six years before her first visit to it. Rainier was the fifth National Park to be designated by Congress, and the publications she was quoting were themselves relatively new, so she is also quite consciously framing the poem through the lens of tourism, of the visitor looking at things, that the poem celebrates, wonders at, and perhaps slightly mocks. So one of the first modernist odes, a praise poem about a powerfully North American subject in dialogue with the whole history of nineteenth-century European mountain odes. And the question of the ode form: Beyond piling up praise in the form of description, where is it going? What values is it getting in right relation to and how does it present or embody them?

The move toward conclusion begins about 150 lines into the poem by moving from a description of one of the mountain’s remarkable flowers, the Calypso orchid, to one of its liveliest birds, the blue jay, a sociable “villain,” who, she remarks, “knows no Greek.”

Comparing the two versions of the poem you will see how she struggled with this transition. I love the oddness of her original impulse. The bluejay’s ignorance of Greek allows her to comment—as against the paganism of Holderlin and Shelly and Pound—on the superficiality of the idea of happiness in classical Greek civilization, which she contrasts with the tough-minded authors of the Park Service pamphlets she has been quoting that forbid guns, hunting, and explosives on the mountain and let you know that if you are going to climb it you’ll need hardtack and raisins. And this leads her—the first-time reader may be a bit dizzy taking it in—to Henry James who, like the mountain, isn’t easy. Infinitely better to read the poem than this paraphrase and to see how she comes at the end—in the manner of the Romantic odes—to the place where she started: the icy glacier itself that she came to praise.

Federico Garcia Lorca arrived in New York City in June 1929. He was thirty-one years old. He completed his ode to Walt Whitman a year later in June 1930 when he was returning to New York from a visit to Cuba. He first published the poem in a limited edition printed in Mexico City in 1933. It was never published in Spain, a conservative culture in which his homosexuality was still a private and closely guarded matter. It’s a very moving poem for that reason. The ode in Spain has a history at least as complicated as the English. There is a massive study of Horace in Spanish and there is a Pindaric tradition. In the 1920s the ode in Spain was still largely metrical, and the Lorca odes in Poet in New York were his first experiments in free verse, the prosody itself part of his homage to Whitman, who had shown him how to imagine a sexuality without shame and to confront the languages of shame in which he had come to understand his own erotic life. The translator has had to deal, as part of the inward journey, with the terms of sexual denigration in several Latin American cultures. Notice the way the poem wavers between ode and elegy, between a love for what Whitman represents and anguish at what seemed to him then the soul-destroying machinery of a new century (which he entangles with homophobia) and the way that the petition at the end of the ode takes the form of a wish:

           Ode to Walt Whitman

           By the East River and the Bronx

           boys were singing, exposing their waists

           with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.

           Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks

           and children drawing stairs and perspectives.

           But none of them could sleep,

           none of them wanted to be the river,

           none of them loved the huge leaves

           or the shoreline’s blue tongue.

           By the East River and the Queensboro

           boys were battling with industry

           and the Jews sold to the river faun

           the rose of circumcision,

           and over bridges and rooftops, the mouth of the sky emptied

           herds of bison driven by the wind.

           But none of them paused,

           none of them wanted to be a cloud,

           none of them looked for ferns

           or the yellow wheel of a tambourine.

           As soon as the moon rises

           the pulleys will spin to alter the sky;

           a border of needles will besiege memory

           and the coffins will bear away those who don’t work.

           New York, mire,

           New York, mire and death.

           What angel is hidden in your cheek?

           Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?

           Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?

           Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,

           have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,

           nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,

           nor your thighs pure as Apollo’s,

           nor your voice like a column of ash,

           old man, beautiful as the mist,

           you moaned like a bird

           with its sex pierced by a needle.

           Enemy of the satyr,

           enemy of the vine,

           and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth . . .

           Not for a moment, virile beauty,

           who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,

           dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river

           with that comrade who would place in your breast

           the small ache of an ignorant leopard.

           Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,

           man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,

           because on penthouse roofs,

           gathered at bars,

           emerging in bunches from the sewers,

           trembling between the legs of chauffeurs,

           or spinning on dance floors wet with absinthe,

           the faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out.

           He’s one, too! That’s right! And they land

           on your luminous chaste beard,

           blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,

           crowds of howls and gestures,

           like cats or like snakes,

           the faggots, Walt Whitman, the faggots,

           clouded with tears, flesh for the whip,

           the boot, or the teeth of the lion tamers.

           He’s one, too! That’s right! Stained fingers

           point to the shore of your dream

           when a friend eats your apple

           with a slight taste of gasoline

           and the sun sings in the navels

           of boys who play under bridges.

           But you didn’t look for scratched eyes,

           nor the darkest swamp where someone submerges children,

           nor frozen saliva,

           nor the curves slit open like a toad’s belly

           that the faggots wear in cars and on terraces

           while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.

           You looked for a naked body like a river.

           Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,

           father of your agony, camellia of your death,

           who would groan in the blaze of your hidden equator.

           Because it’s all right if a man doesn’t look for his delight

           in tomorrow morning’s jungle of blood.

           The sky has shores where life is avoided

           and there are bodies that shouldn’t repeat themselves in the dawn.

           Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.

           This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.

           Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,

           war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,

           the rich give their mistresses

           small illuminated dying things,

           and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

           Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire

           through a vein of coral or a heavenly naked body.

           Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time

           a breeze that drowses in the branches.

           That’s why I don’t raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,

           against the little boy who writes

           the name of a girl on his pillow,

           nor against the boy who dresses as a bride

           in the darkness of the wardrobe,

           nor against the solitary men in casinos

           who drink prostitution’s water with revulsion,

           nor against the men with that green look in their eyes

           who love other men and burn their lips in silence.

           But yes against you, urban faggots,

           tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.

           Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies

           of the love that bestows crowns of joy.

           Always against you, who give boys

           drops of foul death with bitter poison.

           Always against you,

           Fairies of North America,

           Pájaros of Havana,

           Jotos of Mexico,

           Sarasas of Cádiz,

           Apios of Seville,

           Cancos of Madrid,

           Floras of Alicante,

           Adelaidas of Portugal.

           Faggots of the world, murderers of doves!

           Slaves of women. Their bedroom bitches.

           Opening in public squares like feverish fans

           or ambushed in rigid hemlock landscapes.

           No quarter given! Death

           spills from your eyes

           and gathers gray flowers at the mire’s edge.

           No quarter given! Attention!

           Let the confused, the pure,

           the classical, the celebrated, the supplicants

           close the doors of the bacchanal to you.

           And you, lovely Walt Whitman, stay asleep on the Hudson’s banks

           with your beard toward the pole, openhanded.

           Soft clay or snow, your tongue calls for

           comrades to keep watch over your unbodied gazelle.

           Sleep on, nothing remains.

           Dancing walls stir the prairies

           and America drowns itself in machinery and lament.

           I want the powerful air from the deepest night

           to blow away flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep,

           and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites

           that the kingdom of grain has arrived.

28.    Pablo Neruda—Endings: Pablo Neruda wrote over two hundred odes; for a while he wrote one a week for a newspaper. The poems are mostly written in short, sinuous lines, though translators and scholars have noticed that they tend to fall into the seven- and twelve-syllable rhythmic units of classical Spanish poetry. And formally many of them are litanies, cascades of metaphor in praise of the objects they address; and the objects they address are the ordinary stuff of life: tomatoes and sox and ships inside glass bottles and seaweed. If the ode began as an address to divinity, these poems were an answer to the question of how a twentieth-century Marxist poet from a Catholic culture could conjure a divinity from everyday life.

A way to study them formally—to see what Neruda was up to—is to look at how he ends the poems. Where in the classical ode came the request addressed to a god or a patron and in the romantic ode to nature or a creator-imagination, it is interesting to think about what Neruda does with the final turn. Here are five instances, in the translation of Margaret Sayers Peden.

“Ode to an Artichoke” begins by allegorizing it as a soldier, then sends a cook out to buy one in a market, and ends like this:

           Once home

           and in the kitchen

           she drowns it in a pot.

           And thus ends

           in peace

           the saga

           of the armored vegetable

           we call the artichoke,

           as

           leaf by leaf

           we unsheathe

           its delights

           and eat

           the peaceable flesh

           of its green heart.

“Ode to a Dictionary” traces a fairly complicated relation to the dictionary, seen in the arrogance of youth as an unimaginative beast of burden and at other times as the grave of language. The poem takes several turns and ends like this:

           From the depths of your

           dense and reverberating jungle

           grant me,

           at the moment it is needed,

           a single bird song, the luxury

           of one bee,

           one splinter

           of your ancient wood perfumed

           by an eternity of jasmine,

           one

           syllable,

           one tremor, one sound,

           one seed:

           I am of the earth and with words I sing.

“Ode to a Hummingbird” begins by speculating on the evolutionary origins of this creature and ends like this:

           Seed

           of sunlight,

           feathered

           fire,

           smallest

           flying flag,

           petals of silenced peoples,

           syllable

           of buried blood,

           feathered crest

           of our ancient

           subterranean

           heart.

(The adjective antigua and the noun corazon show up often toward the end of these poems.)

“Ode to Seaweed” contains a strange richness of associations. They are the funeral gloves of the ocean, flags, nipples, plunder, coin, a marine version almost of Walt Whitman’s catalog of metaphors for grass. The poem ends like this:

           Orange, rusted spatulate

           shapes, eggs

           of date palms,

           drifting

           fans

           flailed

           by the

           eternal

           flux

           of a marine

           heart,

           islands of Sargasso

           that reach

           my door

           with the plunder

           of

           the rainbow,

           let me

           wear around my neck, on my head,

           the wet vine tendrils

           of the ocean,

           the spent comet

           of the wave.

The often-translated “Ode to My Socks” begins with a description of the gift of a pair of hand-woven socks so beautiful it makes the speaker think less of his feet, makes him reluctant to encase them in merely utilitarian shoes. The ending is interesting because it suggests, playfully, that Neruda did think of odes as ending, at least implicitly, with a moral:

           So this is

           the moral of my ode:

           twice beautiful

           is beauty

           and what is good doubly

           good

           when it is a case of two

           woolen socks

           in wintertime.

POSTMODERN PRACTICE

29.    There is a poem by Robert Pinsky entitled “Poem With Lines in Any Order”:

           Sonny said, Then he shouldn’t have given Molly the two more babies.

           Dave’s sister and her husband adopted the baby, and that was Babe.

           You can’t live in the past.

           Sure he was a tough guy but he was no hero.

           Sonny and Toots went to live awhile with the Braegers.

           It was a time when it seemed like everybody had a nickname.

           Nobody can live in the future.

           When Rose died having Babe, Dave came after the doctor with a gun.

           Toots said, What would you expect? He was a young man and there she was.

           Sonny still a kid himself when Dave moved out on Molly.

           The family gave him Rose’s cousin Molly to marry so she could raise the children.

           There’s no way to just live in the present.

           In their eighties Toots and Sonny still arguing about their father.

           Dave living above the bar with Della and half the family.

The proposition seems to be that this is a poem without a beginning, a middle, and an end because a family and a family’s stories are a kind of echo chamber that exists in space rather than time. So that the first and last lines, for example, could just as well be each in the other’s place. It’s not causality or the narrative that the poet is after, but that sound of old stories getting rehashed through the generations that is itself one definition of family. And in that way it is a sort of ode to this idea of family. The sentences of more general comment—at least the first one—You can’t live in the past—sound like part of the family noise, a thing these people said to get through their lives. So the poem belongs to the formal impulse in contemporary poetry to resist or qualify the idea of beginnings and middles and ends. It wants to be more like a mobile than an arrow shot at a target.

And yet it does presuppose certain formal constraints. It wouldn’t work, or would work very differently, if the three or four (if you count the remark about nicknames) more general remarks were bunched together at the beginning or the end of the poem. It probably doesn’t matter in what order the lines about the past, present, and future appear, but it does matter that they are scattered through the poem. A certain poise is involved in turning these overheard stories and gossip-over-coffee fragments of talk—you can invent your own—I don’t think your aunt Claire ever got over Curt Berndt; the truth is Nell and Winnie never got along—into poetry.

A similar version of the desire not to subordinate one element in a series to another lies behind C. D. Wright’s “The Ozark Odes,” I think. This is a longish poem, or suite of poems, but it is interesting to take the time to study the order of the parts. It matters that it feels a little desultory, but there is a pulse that orders it—the three poems or sections entitled “Lake Return”—connecting the sense of place to sexuality, or the memories stored in sexuality, the erotic pulse of memory and lived life:

The Ozark Odes

           Lake Return

           Maybe you have to be from there to hear it sing:

           Give me your waterweeds, your nipples,

           your shoehorn and your four-year letter jacket,

           the molded leftovers from the singed pot.

           Now let me see your underside, white as fishes.

           I lower my gaze against your clitoral light.

           Rent House

           O the hours I lay on the bed

           looking at the knotted pine

           in the added-on room

           where he kept his old Corona,

           the poet with the big lips—

           where we slept together.

           Somebody’s Mother

           Flour rose from her shoulders

           as she walked out of her kitchen,

           The report of the screendoor,

           the scrapdog unperturbed.

           Afternoon sky pinking up.

           Table Grace

           Bless Lou Vindie, Bless Truman

           bless the fields

           of rocks, the brown recluse

           behind the wallpaper,

           chink in the plaster,

           bless cowchips, bless brambles

           and the copperhead, the honey locusts

           shedding their frilly flower

           on waxed cars, bless them

           the loudmouths and goiters

           and dogs with mange,

           bless each and every one

           for doing their utmost.

           Yea, for they have done

           their naturally suspicious part.

           Girlhood

           Mother had one. She and Bernice racing for the river

           to play with their paperdolls

           because they did not want any big ears

           to hear what their paperdolls were fixing to say.

           Judge

           Had a boyhood. Had his own rooster. Name of Andy.

           Andy liked to ride in Judge’s overall bib.

           Made him bald. This really vexed Judge’s old daddy.

           Arkansas Towns

           Acorn

           Back Gate

           Bald Knob

           Ben Hur

           Biggers

           Blue Ball

           Congo

           Delight

           Ebony

           Eros

           Fifty-Six

           Figure Five

           Flippin

           Four Sisters

           Goshen

           Greasy Corner

           Havana

           Hector

           Hogeye

           Ink

           Jenny Lind

           Little Flock

           Marked Tree

           Mist

           Monkey Run

           Moscow

           Nail

           Okay

           Ozone

           Rag Town

           Ratio

           Seaton Dump

           Self

           Snowball

           Snow Lake

           Sweet Home

           Three Brothers

           Three Folks

           Twist

           Urbanette

           Whisp

           Yellville

           Zent

           Lake Return

           Where the sharp rocks on shore

           Give way to the hairy rock in the shallows,

           We enlisted in the rise and fall of love.

           His seed broadcast like short, sweet grass.

           Nothing came up there.

           Dry Country Bar

           Bourbon not fit to put on a sore. No women enter,

           their men collect in any kind of weather

           with no shirts on whatsoever.

           Café at the Junction

           The way she sees him

           how the rain doesn’t let up

           4-ever blue and vigilant

           as a clock in a corner

           peeling the label from his bottle

           hungry but not touching food

           as she turns down the wet lane

           where oaks vault the road

           The Boyfriend

           wakes in darkness of morning

           and visits the water

           lowering his glad body

           onto a flat rock

           the spiders rearrange

           themselves underneath

           Remedy

           Sty sty leave my eye,

           go to the next feller passing by.

           Porch

           I can still see Cuddihy’s sisters

           trimming the red tufts

           under one another’s arms

           Bait Shop

           Total sales today: 3 doz. minnows, ½ doz. crawdaddies, 4 lead lures,

           loaf of light bread, pack of Raleighs, 3 bags of barbecued pork skins.

           Fred

           One of your more irascible poets from the hill country.

           Retired to his mother’s staunch house

           in Little Rock after her death; began to build

           a desk for Arthur. Beautiful piece

           of work. For a friend. Beautiful.

           Drinking less, putting on a few pounds.

           Lake Return

           Why I come here: need for a bottom, something to refer to;

           where all things visible and invisible commence to swim.

And the final couplet does seem conclusive, though one can imagine the first poem, or section of the poem, reversed to create a slightly different set of thematic emphases. Likewise the other sections that give us snippets of glimpses of the rural Arkansas she aims to celebrate. One might want to make an argument for this particular sequencing of the poem—and compare it to Lorine Niedecker’s “Paean to Place,” from which it may have derived, but a certain looseness is part of its formal force. Compare both Niedecker and Wright to the place poems of the English seventeenth century—Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” and Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”—with their ambulatory manner and sense of hierarchy.

Lyn Hejinian has pursued this impulse in a more formally rigorous way in some of her work. Her essay “The Rejection of Closure” is an argument against the formal notion of arrival and her determination to make poems in which the lines might occur in no particular order (and paradoxically, of course in this particular version of no particular order) is reflected in the title of a recent book, The Unfollowing. Which is to say, the formal principle in operation is the non sequitur. The Unfollowing is either a book of fourteen-line poems or a serial poem made of fourteen-line poems, so it is sonnetish. And the author describes it in an introductory note as having its impulse in elegy but its formal principle is continuous invention, the conversation with no beginning and no end between consciousness and the world that time and our senses—and here the verb is the issue—immerses us in? bombards us with? makes us a part of? It’s the question the form itself interrogates as it fuses sonnet, ode, and elegy. Here is a sample, the second and fourth poems in the book:

           Every minute proves that reality is conditional

           Sounds paddle the air, echoing as I speak my mind

           The door opens, I rise naked from the tub

           It’s strange to return from Abyssinia by train from my bed

           I hear a demographer singing below

           Sleep?—yes I sleep almost in fear of the lovely night before I slept

           Boom—one—one—one, boom one and boom one and one and one

           Only one

           A woman appears carrying a pink bag

           You stay, okay with the sheets, we’ll get a suit, you’re in the story

           When love can’t be composed any better, love can’t be postponed any longer

           Things predicted are always restricted

           Go, smoking pan, with your bacon to window

           This afternoon there will be “une grand séance” and everyone will nap

               *

           One spring the wise guys booming one paraded: boom: I

           The next thing they knew it was a warm day in spring, and each had several deaths to mourn

           Is this another sphinx trick, a hole, a minus-device like a mad wave

           Up go the shades but there is no light outside to be let in

           She concentrated for, she identified in, she told to

           They who accomplished banging gather, they who diminish do so proudly

           Half is done with a quarter to spend for a worrywart wearing sunglasses

           The sun is too coherent, the egg in the glacier hatches out mice

           Mother!

           As generous as a caterpillar she has given her very body away

           Now we witness with the senses and materiality is singled out

           Mad manifest squares, the semantics of an evil activity

           The phrase, this stream, among wolves

           How vulgar the vulnerability of the earholes, the armholes, of anything that serves as a window of the body to the world

30.    The takeaway: Out of litany and prayer came the praise poem and endless lyric variations on the praise poem. In their formal development these poems have a beginning, middle, and end; an inescapable (unless you are Gertrude Stein) three-part structure. The beginning part is often initiated by desire or dissent. The middle section is almost infinitely variable. It can proceed by narrative, by argument, by association, by the elaboration of a metaphor, by a mix of these. In postmodern practice development often proceeds by braiding and disparity, by disruption and non sequitur. An ode can have few or many parts. It can attempt to name, or possess, or stand at the right distance from, in the right relation to, even veer away, from the spoken or unspoken object of desire or imagination of value that initiates it, and its third and final section is apt to get to, or point toward, or try to instantiate, or ask a favor from that object or power. (Which is apt to be, at least implicitly, the power of poetry, or the action of the imagination of which poetry is an instance.)

31.    And the prosodic form in which a poem is cast can intensify or qualify the formal development of the content in any number of ways. See Horace’s Cleopatra ode again: the irony implicit in treating epic material in a lyric stanza that undercuts it or Neruda’s rivery simplification of classical prosody. This is the work that craft consciousness and the unconscious shaping power of imagination are doing all the time in the making of a poem.