The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking The Poet Within

Wilfred Owen’s use of rhyming couplets in the hell of war provides another kind of ironic contrast. In the same way that the employment of ballad form for the dreary and mundane makes both a distinction and a connection, so the use of heroic couplets both contrasts and unites in Owen’s verse: the august and decorous form in such ghastly conditions is a sick joke, but the death agonies, mutilations and horrors of the soldiers’ lives are raised to heroic status by their incarnation in heroic couplets. Owen’s ‘A Terre: (Being the Philosophy of Many Soldiers)’ uses Browning-style dramatic monologue in slant-rhymed couplets, casting Owen himself as the visitor to a field hospital where a ruined soldier lies and addresses him.Sit on the bed. I’m blind, and three parts shell.Be careful; can’t shake hands now; never shall.Both arms have mutinied against me,– brutes.My fingers fidget like ten idle brats.I tried to peg out soldierly,–no use!One dies of war like any old disease.This bandage feels like pennies on my eyes.I have my medals?–Discs to make eyes close.My glorious ribbons?–Ripped from my own backIn scarlet shreds. (That’s for your poetry book.)

Laurence Lerner, Thom Gunn and Tony Harrison have all written with distinction in heroic couplets, as did Seamus Heaney in ‘Elegy for a Still-Born Child’ and his superb poem ‘The Outlaw’, which might be regarded as a kind of darkly ironic play on an eclogue or georgic–Virgilian verse celebrating and philosophically discoursing upon the virtues of agricultural life.

You may find yourself drawn to heroic verse, you may not. Whatever your views, I would recommend practising it: the form has compelling and enduring qualities. Move in: the structure is still sound and spacious enough to accommodate all your contemporary furniture and modern gadgets.

Poetry Exercise 13

Try a short dramatic monologue, a la Browning, in which a young man in police custody, clearly stoned off his head, tries to explain away the half-ounce of cannabis found on his person. Use the natural rhythms of speech, running-on through lines, pausing and running on again, but within rhymed iambic pentameter. You will be amazed what fun you can have with such a simple form. If you don’t like my scenario, choose another one, but do try and make it contemporary in tone.

V

The Ode

Sapphic–Pindaric–Horatian–lyric–anacreontic

Deriving from odein, the Greek for to chant, the ode is an open form of lyric verse made Public Monument. In English poetry it was once the most grand, ceremonial and high-minded of forms, but for the last hundred years or so it has been all but shorn of that original grandeur, becoming no more than a (frequently jokey) synonym for ‘poem’.

Partly this is the due to the popularity of John Keats’s four great odes ‘To Autumn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode on Melancholy’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ which, together with the odes of Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and the rest, turned the form in on itself. Poets today may choose to call their works odes, but rather than suggesting any formal implications this is likely to promise, in the shadow of Keats, a romantic reflection on such themes as nature, beauty, art, the soul and their relationship to the very making of a poem itself.

There are three main genres of classical ode which do have more formal natures or specific functions however–the Sapphic, Pindaric and Horatian, named after the Greeks Sappho and Pindar, and the Latin poet Horace. Of these, the most formally fixed and the most popular today by a dodecametric mile is the SAPPHIC:

SAPPHICLet’s hear it for the SAPPHIC ODEAn oyster bed of gleaming pearlsA finely wrought poetic mode

Not just for girls.Lesbian Sappho made this formWith neat Adonic final lineHer sex life wasn’t quite the norm

And nor is mine.Three opening lines of just four feetCreate a style I rather like:It’s closely cropped and strong yet sweet–

In fact, pure dike.

Actually, the above displays the lineaments of the English stress-based imitation as adapted from the classical original, which was made up of four eleven-syllable lines in this metre:

The symbol stands for an anceps, a metrical unit (or semeion) which in classical verse can be long or short, but for our purposes means can be either stressed or unstressed, according to the poet’s wishes. An anceps offers a free choice of trochee or spondee in other words. So, doggerel that makes a classical Sapphic Ode might go:Noble SAPPHO fashioned her odes of high-flownVerse in four lines, marked by their classic profile.Though she’s now best remembered for her full-blown

Lesbian lifestyle.

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

Dear Algie Swinburne wrote Sapphics too:All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron

Stood and beheld me.…Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singingSongs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,

Hearing, to hear them.

The more characteristically English way to adapt the form has been to write in good old iambic tetrameter, as in my first sampler above and Pope’s ‘Ode on Solitude’:Happy the man, whose wish and careA few paternal acres bound,Content to breathe his native air

In his own groundWhose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,Whose flocks supply him with attire,Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

In winter fire.

The contemporary Canadian poet Anne Carson has used the form (and translated Sappho’s own odes). These two stanzas are from her ‘Eros the Bittersweet’:no: tongue breaks and thinfire is racing under skinand in eyes no sight and drummingfills earsand cold sweat holds me and shakinggrips me all, greener than grassI am and dead–or