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By David Biespiel, Oregon State University Poet-in-Residence
3 April 2023
There’s a good argument to be made that most poems, in many languages, are odes, which simply means: a poem that celebrates something -- celebrates or extols or ceremonializes, or even blesses or revels in, or glorifies, or just simply digs into whatever a poem is talking about, be it a person, a place, a thing, an event, an idea. Could be it’s a season, a bird, a state of mind. It could a bad haircut, a scar, a stranger like John Doe, your hometown, a pair of socks, your dog or cat, a blizzard, a diner, a sink full of dishes, even a bridge, or the west wind.
Now, traditionally, there are two kinds of odes: public and private.
What we call Pindaric Odes (named after the fifth century BCE Greek poet Pindar) are odes addressed to people or places or events of a public nature: like Ode to King Charles or Ode to Serena Williams or Ode to the Empire State Building or Ode to the Last Astronauts to Stand on the Moon. You might say that Pindaric Odes were early Spoken Word kinds of poems because they were performed on stage: a chorus moved from one side of the stage to the other, alternating the parts. Now, you need a lot of infrastructure to pull off a Pindaric ode, at least a stage and a microphone and a bunch of actors, though that kind of poetry hasn’t been much in vogue since its most recent heyday six hundred years ago in France.
What we call Horatian Odes (named after the first century BCE Latin poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus) are odes addressed to private matters, and these are the kinds of poems we think of today as the contemporary ode: The 20th century Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was a master of the Horatian ode: he wrote an ode to his pencil, to a tomato, to an onion, to a broken down old movie theater, the dictionary, even to his shoelaces. And a bunch of other stuff he found lying around the house.
I’m going to share a Neruda ode with you in a moment about a fish, but, first: remember: you have public odes and private odes. Either way: Here’s how they all work. Odes move, to one degree or another, like a three-part dance. The old Greek terms for this were strophe, antistrophe, and epode. Think back to the staging of the Greek Pindaric ode I was telling you about: the strophe is said by the chorus from one side of the stage, then they all dance over to the other side and say the antistrophe, and then they do the epode, where the poem ends, having danced back over somewhere near the middle of the stage. Now if you take away the stage, but keep the three part movements you have the order of the contemporary ode, more or less.
Another framing of this three part movement is known as point, counterpoint, and stand. Articulate one thing, move in a different direction, and resolve it. I like to call this focus, refocus, and resolve.
Now in English, the most famous poet of odes is John Keats. He wrote several Horatian odes over the spring, summer, and fall of 1819, less than two years before he died, very young, at the age of 25. Keats wrote an ode to laziness, an ode to his psyche, an ode to a bird (a nightingale), to a vase (that’s the Grecian Urn), to his feelings of sadness, and to a season (autumn). In each of these, as with most modern odes, what you need to know is not that odes seek answers, but questions. To write an ode is to explore, delve into, probe, inspect, burrow, and sift whatever subject you want to with extreme consideration or immersion.
So, here’s that fish ode by Pablo Neruda, written in Spanish, translated into English by Robin Robertson. As you read it, determine for yourself what might be its three parts of focus, refocus, and resolve, or turn, counter-turn and stand, or strophe, antistrophe, and epode.
“Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” by Pablo Neruda
Here,
among the market vegetables,
this torpedo
from the ocean
depths,
a missile
that swam,
now
lying in front of me
dead.
Surrounded
by the earth’s green froth
— these lettuces, bunches of carrots —
only you
lived through
the sea’s truth, survived
the unknown, the
unfathomable
darkness, the depths
of the sea,
the great
abyss,
le grand abîme,
only you:
varnished
black-pitched
witness
to that deepest night.
Only you:
dark bullet
barreled
from the depths,
carrying
only
your
one wound,
but resurgent,
always renewed,
locked into the current,
fins fletched
like wings
in the torrent,
in the coursing
of
the
underwater
dark,
like a grieving arrow,
sea-javelin, a nerveless
oiled harpoon.
Dead
in front of me,
catafalqued king
of my own ocean;
once
sappy as a sprung fir
in the green turmoil,
once seed
to sea-quake,
tidal wave, now
simply
dead remains;
in the whole market
yours
was the only shape left
with purpose or direction
in this
jumbled ruin
of nature;
you are
a solitary man of war
among these frail vegetables,
your flanks and prow
black
and slippery
as if you were still
a well-oiled ship of the wind,
the only
true
machine
of the sea: unflawed,
undefiled,
navigating now
the waters of death.
Want to cite this?
MLA Citation: Biespiel, David. "What is an Ode?" Oregon State Guide to English Literary Terms, 3 Apr. 2023, Oregon State University, https://liberalarts.oregonstate.edu/wlf/what-ode-definition-and-examples. Accessed [insert date].
