Odes are formal and lyrical, poems that address and celebrate a person, place, thing, or idea. The ode stands as a literary technique. The tone is generally solemn and formal, as is the serious subject matter. The word “ode” is derived from the Greek word “aeidein”, meaning to chant or to sing. The stanza form varies, generally using elaborate patterns. A principal feature of ode is its uniform metrical feet, but poets do not always follow this strict rule. There are three main types of odes, which contributes greatly to the variety of formality in the odes. The three forms include the Pindar ode, the Horatian ode, and the irregular ode.
Pindar Ode
The Pindar (Greek) Ode was named for Pindar, an ancient Greek poet, who began writing poems that were sung at public events. They were written generally to honor gods or celebrate triumphs of rulers or athletes, so they are known as “triumphal” odes. The number of stanzas may vary but does have a fixed stanza-structure or pattern. The stanzas are invariably arranged in groups of three called a triad. The first stanza is called a “strophe”, which may be repeated as a unit. The second stanza is called an “antistrophe” and is a rhetorical device that involves the repetition of the same word at the end of a phrase, clause, or stanza. The third stanza is an “epode”. The first two stanzas typically mirror each other in meter and length, while the epode differs in meter and length from the first two. The total number of stanzas may vary, though it normally ranges from one triad to thirteen in length, lending this style to many variations in metrical length. Therefore, the Pindaric Ode has a fixed stanza-pattern but fluctuates rhythmically and metrically. William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Reflection of Early Childhood” is an example of a Pindar Ode.
Horatian Ode
The Horatian Ode is named for the Latin poet, Horace. Horace imitated Pindar but with modifications. The Horatian Ode is informal, meditative, and intimate. They are written in a more philosophical, contemplative manner. Generally, the themes or subject matters are simple and sensually pleasing. They are informal in tone, so they are devoid of strict rules. The ode generally consists of a couplet or quatrains of any number. They are more or less formal; metrical structure, but without the same triad division as in the Pindaric. The stanzas can be rhymed or unrhymed. Notably, Horatian Odes can be less irregular in comparison to the Pindaric, but have the same meter, rhyme scheme, and length throughout. John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is an example of a Horatian Ode.
Irregular Ode
The irregular ode is completely without any formal rhyme scheme or structure. It neither relies on the triad structure of the Pindaric Ode or the two- or -four-line stanza of the Horatian Ode. Irregular Odes use rhyme scheme and meter, but allows lines to rhyme anywhere within the length. Wordsworth and Keats often wrote the ode in the irregular form for more freedom in their verse. Keats’s “One on a Grecian Urn” is irregular.
John Keats and The Ode
Many of the odes from the English Romantic poets vary in stanza form, and often address intensely emotional personal crises, or celebrate objects or images that lead to revelation. John Keats is famously known for his collection of odes that he wrote and published in 1819: “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, “Ode on Indolence”, “Ode on Melancholy”, “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, and “To Autumn”. This was Keats attempt to create a new type of short lyrical poetry. While Keats is also famous for other poems and his epics, the odes stand out. He was particularly interested in imagination and the exploration of preoccupation conflicts: dreams and realities, actuality, and the coexistence of beauty and pain on earth. Keats used the odes to explore these ideas. His odes contain material from the many areas of Keats’s sensibility through which he mediated through with his senses. The odes intermix the intellectual and physical things that plagued Keats.
Keats’s fullness of expression is held in the control of his easy, yet strong, stanzas. Each of Keats’s major odes is a variation of a basic pattern that he developed out of dissatisfaction with the Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnet forms. He wrote in a letter to his brother that he was “endeavouring to discover a better Sonnet stanza than we have. The legitimate does not suit the language well, from the pouncing rhymes; the other appears to elegiac, and the couplet at the end of it has seldom a pleasing effect. I do not pretend to have succeeded. It will explain itself.” Keats’s basic ode structure combines the two. He was first tempted at writing sonnets but found them too restricting. Keats used the odes as a vehicle best suited to his own genius (Watson, 1992). His odes typically begin with four lines rhyming ABAB (Shakespearean sonnet), giving way to regular beginning. This is followed by the adaptation of the Petrarchan sestet, sometimes rhyming CDECDE. Combining the two, Keats thought avoided Shakespeare’s thrice-repeated quatrain and “pouncing rhyme”, and the overweighting Petrarchan sestet by the octave. There is variation to this pattern in a shortened line in “Ode to a Nightingale” and eleven-line stanza in “To Autumn”. Keats’s odes are notable due to the change in form and rhyme, but also because he turned the conditions of art and form to his own advantage.
Resources
Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats, 2002. Harvard University Press, 2002.
“Ode – Examples and Definition of Ode.” Literary Devices, 19 Aug. 2017, literarydevices.net/ode/.
“Ode.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, 2021, www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ode.
Watson, J.R. (1992). English Poetry of the Romantic Period 1789-1830 (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi-org.colorado.idm.oclc.org/10.4324/9781315844831.