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, feelings of sadness, and an ode 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.
And I’ll end the video by reading it to you. And as I do, 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.
This is the poem “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.
That’s “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” by Pablo Neruda,
translated by Robin Robertson.