Odes! - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Odes!

Poems of CelebrationSlide2

It’s not true that all poems are depressing!

Odes can:

Celebrate

Commemorate

Meditate on people, events, or, in Neruda’s case, ordinary objectsSlide3

A Brief History of the Ode

Originally

Formally structured

Written for choruses in Greek plays to sing or chantSlide4

Pindaric Odes

Chorus speaks and moves left, speaks again and moves right, finishes with a third response

Left = strophe

Same stanza form

Right = antistrophe

Final response = epode = different form

Pindaric odes were celebratory and heroicSlide5

“Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

Wm

Woodsworth

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight

To me did seem

Apparelled

in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;--

Turn

wheresoe’er

I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.Slide6

Horation

Ode

Short lyric poems (lyric poems express thought or feelings rather than telling a story)

Stanzas of 2-4 lines

In the manner of the Roman poet Horace

intimate and reflective rather than celebratory and heroic

Often addressed to a friend and deal with friendship, love, and the practice of poetry. Slide7

Example:

An extract from 'Ode to a Nightingale'

by John Keats (1795-1821)

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains (A)

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, (B)

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains (A)

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: (B)

'Tis

not through envy of the happy lot, (C)

But being too happy in thy happiness,- (D)

That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, (E)

In some melodious plot (C)

Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, (D)

Singest

of summer in full-throated ease. (E)Slide8

Cowleyan

Ode

Used by modern poets such as Neruda

Modern odes may be humorous, but still commemorate the beauty poets find in unexpected places

With the

Cowleyan

Ode, the ode is freed from formal constraints of rhyme and meter and stanza pattern

Neruda uses short-lined free verse for his odes