Poetry Form Week 29

The Horatian ode 

The Horatian ode is a short lyric poem written in stanzas of two or four lines in the manner of the 1st-century-bc Latin poet Horace.   The structure of the Horatian ode is less complex than the more technically structured for that the poet Pindar used for his prose though in the emulation of Pindaric odes the focus is on the events or circumstances of a happening. Horace’s odes are considered to be intimate and reflective, dealing often with friendship, love and the practice with a sense that they were written to a friend. To emulate Horace’s ode style does not require the rigidity of the Pindaric ode, the poet can create their own stanzas, meters and rhyming patterns, with only stern stipulation being that the structure must be repeated in each succeeding stanza.

 The Ship of State (Odes I, 14)

Quintus Horatius Flaccus

On Ship! New billows sweep thee out

Seaward. What wilt thou? Hold the port, be stout
See'st not thy mast
How rent by stiff Southwestern blast?

Thy side, of rowers how forlorn?

Thine hull, with groaning yards, with rigging torn,
Can ill sustain
The fierce, and ever fiercer main;

Thy gods, no more than sails entire,

From whom yet once they need might aid require,
Oh Pontic Pine,
The first of woodland stocks is thine.

Yet race and name are but as dust,

Not painted sterns gave storm-tost seamen trust;
Unless thou dare
To be the sport of storms, beware.

O fold at best a weary weight,

A yearning care and constant strain of late,
O shun the seas
That girt those glittering Cyclades

Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-striken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!