The Ode Less Travelled

by Stephen Fry

  Has little use for grandeur, pomp and show,

  Preferring inward grief and private woe

  To be a poet’s theme.

  ‘So, sad as it may seem,

  Thy style of verse has had its day

  Farewell, God speed!’ these doubters say,

  ‘We have no need of thee, Pindaric Ode,

  Our future lies along another road.’

  Epode/The Stand

  Perhaps they speak too soon, such men,

  Perhaps the form will rise again.

  A nation needs a human public voice

  Its griefs to mourn, its triumphs to rejoice.

  When life gets mean and hard,

  Call out the national bard!

  So Pindar, tune thy golden lyre,

  Thou hast a people to inspire.

  When glory comes, or crisis darkly bodes

  We may have need of thine immortal odes!

  Yes, well. Quite. But you get the idea. Sappho’s fellow Aeolian, Pindar is associated with a form much more suited to ceremonial occasions and public addresses: the PINDARIC ODE. He developed it from choral dance for the purpose of making encomiums or praise songs that congratulate athletes or generals on their victories, actors on their performances, philosophers and statesmen on their wisdom and so on. They are written in groups of three stanzas called triads, each triad being divided into strophe (rhymes with ‘trophy’), antistrophe (rhymes with ‘am pissed today’) and epode (‘ee-pode’). Ben Jonson, who wrote a splendid example, gave them the jolly English names Turn, Counter-Turn and Stand. The choice of stanza length and metre is variable, so long as the poem is in triads and each stanza is identical in scheme: this consistency is called a homostrophic structure. I have followed the scheme Jonson invents for his ‘Pindaric Ode to the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’. He begins with a pair of tetrameters, then a pair of pentameters, then trimeters, tetrameters again and finally pentameters, all as rhyming couplets: each stanza must be identically structured, however, that is the key. As I have tried to indicate with mine, the strophe states a theme, addresses a hero, king, Muse, athlete, God or other such thing and praises them, celebrating their virtues and importance (Pindaric Odes themselves in my case); the antistrophe can express doubt, another point of view or some countervailing theme. The epode then tries to unite the two ideas, or comes down in favour of one view or the other. It is thesis, antithesis and synthesis to some extent, a dialectical structure. It derives actually from a Greek choric form in which the dancers would literally turn one way and then the other.

  Horatian Ode

  There are no real formal requirements to observe in a HORATIAN ODE, so I shan’t bother to write a sampler for you: they should be, like their Pindaric cousins, homostrophic. The Latin poet Horace adapted Pindar’s style to suit Roman requirements. English imitations were popular between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a most notable example being Andrew Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (written in rhyming couplets in fours and threes:‘He nothing common did or mean/Upon that memorable scene’). Perhaps the last great two in this manner in our language are Tennyson’s ‘Ode on the Death of Wellington’ and Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. It is common in the Horatian ode, as in the Pindaric, to include a direct address (APOSTROPHE) as Auden does:

  Earth, receive an honoured guest:

  William Yeats is laid to rest.

  The Lyric Ode

  Wordsworth apostrophises Nature in his Ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’:

  And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills and Groves!

  But here we are looking at a wholly different kind of ode. Although Horace did write public celebratory odes in the Pindaric manner to suit the Roman temper (and especially the short one of his interfering patron, the Emperor Augustus) his real voice is heard in quieter, more contemplative and gently philosophical lyrics. These are the odes with which we associate the great romantics.

  These poets created their own forms, varying their stanzaic structure and length, rhyme-scheme and measure for each poem. To call them ‘odes’ in the classical sense is perhaps inappropriate, but since they used the word we can include them in this section. The great Keats foursome emerged more from his development of sonnet structure than out of any debt to Horace or Pindar, yet the meditative-romantic or lyric ode that he and his fellow poets between them created does still bear the traces of a general tripartite structure. They do not follow the stricter triadic design of the Pindaric form, but usually move from physical description to meditation and finally to some kind of insight, resolution or stasis. An object, phenomenon or image is invoked, addressed or observed by an (often troubled) ode writer; the observation provokes thought which in turn results in some kind of conclusion, decision or realisation. We will meet this structure again when we look at the sonnet. Whether the lyric ode truly descends from the classical ode or from the medieval sonnet is a historical and academic matter which, while of no doubt frantic interest, we shall leave unexplored.

  Often the poet, as in grand public odes, opens with direct address: Shelley does so in ‘Skylark’ and ‘Ode to the West Wind’:

  Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

  Bird thou never wert.

  O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being –

  Or they apostrophise their hero later in the poem as Keats does the Nightingale and Autumn:

  Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

  Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

  But it is so usual to open a poem with an invocation, ‘O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers’ (‘To Psyche’), ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness’ (‘On a Grecian Urn’), that you might almost define the romantic ode as being a meditative poem that commences with a direct address, an address which puts the O! in Ode, as it were.

  If you are planning to write an ode yourself, it is unlikely, I suspect, to be Pindaric or Horatian in any classical, ceremonial sense; you may choose to call anything you write an ode, but it is as well to bear in mind the history and associations that go with the appellation.

  We will finish with the most pleasant member of the ode family in my estimation. It combines a wholly agreeable nature with a delightfully crunchy name and ought by rights to be far more popular and better known than it is: simple to write, simple to read and easy to agree with, meet –

  ANACREONTICS

  Syllabically it’s seven.

  Thematically it’s heaven,

  Little lines to celebrate

  Wine and love and all that’s great.

  Life is fleeting, death can wait,

  Trochees bounce along with zest

  Telling us that Pleasure’s best.

  Dithyrambic8 measures traipse,

  Pressing flesh and pressing grapes.

  Fill my glass and squeeze my thighs,

  Hedonism takes the prize.

  Broach the bottle, time to pour!

  Cupid’s darts and Bacchus’ juice

  Use your magic to produce

  Something humans can enjoy.

  Grab a girl, embrace a boy,

  Strum your lyre and hum this tune –

  Life’s too quick and death’s too soon.

  Anacreon (pronounced: Anácreon) was a sixth-century Greek poet whose name lives on in the style of verse that bears his name ANACREONTICS (anacreóntics). Actually, we barely know anything he wrote, his reputation rests on a haul of work called the Anacreontea, published in France in the sixteenth century. It was later discovered that these were actually not works by him, but later imitations written in his honour. No matter, Anacreon had been venerated by Horace, who shared his sybaritic, Epicurean philosophy, and by many English-language poets from Herrick and Cowley to the present day.

  There was an Anacreontic Society in the eighteenth century dedicated to ‘wit, harmony and the god of wine,’ though its real
purpose became the convivial celebration of music, hosting evenings for Haydn and other leading musicians of the day, as well as devising their own club song:‘To Anacreon in Heav’n’. A society member, John Stafford Smith, wrote the music for it, a tune which somehow got pinched by those damn Yankees who use it to this day for their national anthem,‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ – ‘Oh say can you see, by the dawn’s early light’ and so on. Strange to think that the music now fitting

  . . .yet wave

  O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

  was actually written to fit

  . . . entwine

  The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s wine!

  And this in a country where they prohibited alcohol for the best part of a quarter of a century, a country where they look at you with pitying eyes if you order a weak spritzer at lunchtime. Tsch!

  The poet most associated with English anacreontics is the seventeenth-century Abraham Cowley: here he is extolling Epicureanism over Stoicism in ‘The Epicure’:

  Crown me with roses while I live,

  Now your wines and ointments give:

  After death I nothing crave,

  Let me alive my pleasures have:

  All are Stoics in the grave.

  And a snatch of another, simply called ‘Drinking’:

  Fill up the bowl then, fill it high,

  Fill all the glasses there, for why

  Should every creature drink but I,

  Why, man of morals, tell me why?

  Three hundred years later one of my early literary heroes, Norman Douglas, observing a wagtail drinking from a birdbath, came to this conclusion:

  Hark’ee, wagtail: Mend your ways;

  Life is brief, Anacreon says,

  Brief its joys, its ventures toilsome;

  Wine befriends them – water spoils ’em.

  Who’s for water? Wagtail, you?

  Give me wine! I’ll drink for two.

  One of the enduring functions of all art from Anacreon to Francis Bacon, from Horace to Damien Hirst has been, is and always will be to remind us of the transience of existence, to stand as a memento mori that will never let us forget Gloria Monday’s sick transit. We do, of course, know that we are going to die, and all too soon, but we need art to remind us not to spend too much time in the office caring about things that on our deathbeds will mean less than nothing. The particularity of anacreontics (simply writing in sevensyllable trochaic tetrameter as above does not make your verse anacreontic: the verse must concern itself with pleasure, wine, erotic love and the fleeting nature of existence) is echoed in the contemplative odes and love poetry of Horace; we find it in Shakespeare, Herrick, Marvell and all poetry between them and the present day. It is also a theme of Middle-Eastern poetry, Hafiz (sometimes called the Anacreon of Persia) and Omar Khayyam most notably.

  What of Dylan Thomas’s ‘In My Craft or Sullen Art’?

  In my craft or sullen art

  Exercised in the still night

  When only the moon rages

  And the lovers lie abed

  With all their griefs in their arms,

  I labour by singing light

  Not for ambition or bread

  Or the strut and trade of charms

  On the ivory stages

  But for the common wages

  Of their most secret heart.

  Wonderful as the poem is, dedicated to lovers as it is, presented in short sweet lines as it is, it would be bloody-minded to call it anacreontic: a hint of Eros, but no sense of Dionysus or of the need to love or drink as time’s winged chariot approaches. However, I would call one of the most beautiful poems in all twentieth-century English verse, Auden’s ‘Lullaby’ (1937), anacreontic, although I have never seen it discussed as such. Here are a few lines from the beginning:

  Lay your sleeping head, my love,

  Human on my faithless arm;

  Time and fevers burn away

  Individual beauty from

  Thoughtful children, and the grave

  Proves the child ephemeral:

  But in my arms till break of day

  Let the living creature lie,

  Mortal, guilty, but to me

  The entirely beautiful.

  The references to flesh, love and the transience of youth make me feel this does qualify. I have no evidence that Auden thought of it as anacreontic and I may be wrong. Certainly one feels that not since Shakespeare’s earlier sonnets has any youth had such gorgeous verse lavished upon him. I dare say both the subjects proved unworthy (the poets knew that, naturally) and both boys are certainly dead – the grave has proved the child ephemeral. Ars longa, vita brevis:9 life is short, but art is long.

  VI

  Closed Forms

  Villanelle – sestina – ballade, ballade redoublé

  Certain closed forms, such as those we are going to have fun with now, seem demanding enough in their structures and patterning to require some of the qualities needed for so-doku and crosswords. It takes a very special kind of poetic skill to master the form and produce verse of a quality that raises the end result above the level of mere cunningly wrought curiosity. They are the poetic equivalent of those intricately carved Chinese étuis that have an inexplicable ivory ball inside them.

  THE VILLANELLE

  Kitchen Villanelle

  How rare it is when things go right

  When days go by without a slip

  And don’t go wrong, as well they might.

  The smallest triumphs cause delight –

  The kitchen’s clean, the taps don’t drip,

  How rare it is when things go right.

  Your ice cream freezes overnight,

  Your jellies set, your pancakes flip

  And don’t go wrong, as well they might

  When life’s against you, and you fight

  To keep a stiffer upper lip.

  How rare it is when things go right,

  The oven works, the gas rings light,

  Gravies thicken, potatoes chip

  And don’t go wrong as well they might.

  Such pleasures don’t endure, so bite

  The grapes of fortune to the pip.

  How rare it is when things go right

  And don’t go wrong as well they might.

  The villanelle is the reason I am writing this book. Not that lame example, but the existence of the form itself.

  Let me tell you how it happened. I was in conversation with a friend of mine about six months ago and the talk turned to poetry. I commented on the extraordinary resilience and power of ancient forms, citing the villanelle.10

  ‘What’s a villanelle?’

  ‘Well, it’s a pastoral Italian form from the sixteenth century written in six three-line stanzas where the first line of the first stanza is used as a refrain to end the second and fourth stanzas and the last line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third, fifth and sixth,’ I replied with fluent ease.

  You have never heard such a snort of derision in your life.

  ‘What? You have got to be kidding!’

  I retreated into a resentful silence, wrapped in my own thoughts, while this friend ranted on about the constraint and absurdity of writing modern poetry in a form dictated by some medieval Italian shepherd. Inspiration suddenly hit me. I vaguely remembered that I had once heard this friend express great admiration for a certain poet.

  ‘Who’s your favourite twentieth-century poet?’ I asked nonchalantly.

  Many were mentioned. Yeats, Eliot, Larkin, Hughes, Heaney, Dylan Thomas.

  ‘And your favourite Dylan Thomas poem?’

  ‘It’s called “Do not go gentle into that good night”.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Does it have any, er, what you might call form particularly? Does it rhyme, for instance?’

  He scratched his head.‘Well, yeah it does rhyme I think.“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” and all that. But it’s like – modern. You know, Dylan Thomas.
Modern. No crap about it.’

  ‘Would you be surprised to know’, I said, trying to keep a note of ringing triumph from my voice,‘that “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a straight-down-the-line, solid gold, one hundred per cent perfect, unadulterated villanelle?’

  ‘Bollocks!’ he said. ‘It’s modern. It’s free.’

  The argument was not settled until we had found a copy of the poem and my friend had been forced to concede that I was right.‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ is indeed a perfect villanelle, following all the rules of this venerable form with the greatest precision. That my friend could recall it only as a ‘modern’ poem with a couple of memorable rhyming refrains is a testament both to Thomas’s unforced artistry and to the resilience and adaptability of the form itself: six three-line stanzas or tercets,11 each alternating the refrains introduced in the first stanza and concluding with them in couplet form:

  Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

  Because their words had forked no lightning they

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

  Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  And you, my father, there on the sad height,

  Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  The conventional way to render the villanelle’s plan is to call the first refrain (‘Do not go gentle’) A1 and the second refrain (‘Rage, rage . . .’)A2. These two rhyme with each other (which is why they share the letter): the second line (‘Old age should burn’) establishes the b rhyme which is kept up in the middle line of every stanza.