bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

helpersCheckIsPostiesArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

moreOnThisArticles

urlAlias

commentCount

sponsorType

authorLocations

authors

paywallTypes

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

socialHeadline

headline

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

publishedDate

additionalInfoBoxes

images

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

createdDate

sponsor

factSheets

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

copyrighted

customTimezone

liveContents

SCMP Reporter

Today's Poetry on the Air, at 10.05 am on RTHK Radio 4, looks at odes.

  Odes started life in the open air theatres of ancient Greece, more than 2,500 years ago.

  Some of these odes became famous and were imitated by poets.

 As more writers wrote odes, they began to follow new styles and an ode became any fairly long lyrical poem on a particular subject.

 During this century there have been at least two great odes written in English, one by an American, the other by an English poet.

  Allen Tate (1899-1979) wrote Ode to the Confederate Dead describing a graveyard for the soldiers who died in the American Civil War.

 Row after row with strict impunity   The headstones yield their names to the element,   The wind whirrs without recollection;   . . . the splayed leaves   Pile up . . .

  It is autumn and so there are many fallen leaves from the trees. Fallen autumn leaves are an ancient image for all the human beings who have died. Tate brings back the image of the dead through autumn leaves throughout the poem:   Think of the autumns that have come and gone!  Later, he uses the leaves as a refrain:  We shall say only the leaves   Flying, plunge and expire.

  To expire is to die. The leaves fall and expire like soldiers who fall and die in battle. Because it is full of thoughts about dying and the dead, we could call this poem an elegy as well as an ode.

  The English poet W H Auden wrote a memorable 20th century ode called In Praise of Limestone, about the white cliffs of Dover.

 Mark these rounded slopes   With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath,   A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs   That spurt out everywhere with a chuckie,   Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving   Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain   The butterfly and the lizard.

  The poem goes on to give his divided view of England, critical and yet accepting.

  But his real love is not the people but the countryside. The ode ends with Auden's image for something unattained and perfect, like heaven:   . . . when I try to imagine a faultless love   Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur   Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

 Odes can be on any subject and in modern times have no set form or rhyme scheme.

  Serious odes are usually 70 lines or more long.

  In a previous programme we discussed John Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, one of the great odes of the 17th century.

  The Romantic poets also wrote odes. William Wordsworth wrote a justly famous ode called Intimations of Immortality.

  His friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge also wrote a famous ode, Dejection, about being depressed and downhearted.

  But Coleridge also produced a very beautiful ode called Frost at Midnight, giving his thoughts about bringing up his newborn infant in the country rather than in the town.

  Here are a few lines. It is midnight and it is cold:   The inmates of my cottage, all rest,   Have left me to that solitude, which suits   Abstruser musings: save that at my side   My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

  This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,   With all the numberless goings- on of life,   Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame   Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;   The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote one of the best known Romantic odes, Ode to the West Wind.

  The best English Romantic odes were written by a trainee surgeon, John Keats.

  Keats, a Londoner, died aged 26, from tuberculosis caught while nursing his dying brother.

  Keats wrote wonderfully rich poetry, including his extremely beautiful Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode on Melancholy, To Autumn and Ode to a Nightingale.

  The wonderful richness of a good harvest of fruit and crops and even the honey in the honeycomb are all brought vividly to life by Keats in the first part or stanza of To Autumn:   Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;   Conspiring with him how to load and bless   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-east run;   To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;   To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,   And still more, later flowers for the bees,   Until they think warm days will never cease,   For summer has oe'r-brimmed their clammy cells.

  In the third and final part of this ode, the Londoner brings us face to face again with nature and the countryside, as if he longs to be out of the city in the autumn weather.

  For him, each season has its charm and though Spring is a delight, autumn has as much to offer:   Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, - - he tells autumn.

This is an edited version of the programme 



Ode abode of romantics