Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
Elegy:
a Greek or Latin form in alternating dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter
lines; and a melancholy poem lamenting its subject's death but ending in
consolation. Examples in English include John Milton's "Lycidas," Thomas Gray's
"Elegy," Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Adonais," Alfred lord Tennyson's "In
Memoriam," Matthew Arnold's "Thyrsis," Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Wreck of the
Deutschland," and Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed."
Ambrose Pierce parodies Gray's poem in "Elegy."
Ode:
a poem of high seriousness with irregular stanzaic forms that pays tribute to
something, usually an object or an individual.
• The regular Pindaric or Greek ode imitates the passionate manner of
Pindar (ca. 552-442 B.C.) and consists of a strophe, an antistrophe,
and an epode.
• In English the Pindaric odes are termed irregular, Cowleyan, or just
English. In 1706 William Congreve wrote that "The Character of these
late Pindariques, is a Bundle of rambling incoherent Thoughts,
express'd in a like parcel of irregular Stanza's." Examples include
Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard," and William
Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality."
• Horatian odes, after the Latin poet Horace (65-8 B.C.), were written in
quatrains in a more philosophical, civil manner. Examples include
Andrew Marvell's "Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland"
and William Collins' "Ode to Evening."
• The Sapphic ode consists of quatrains, three 11-syllable lines, and a
final 5-syllable line, unrhyming but with a strict metre. For example,
Swinburne's "Sapphics" and Ezra Pound's "Apparuit."
1
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
Villanelle
1. It is a poem of nineteen lines.
2. It has five stanzas, each of three lines, with a final one of four lines (5 tercets and a
3.
4.
5.
6.
quatrain).
The first line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the second and fourth
stanzas.
The third line of the first stanza is repeated as the last line of the third and fifth stanzas.
These two refrain lines follow each other to become the second-to-last and last lines of
the poem.
The rhyme scheme is aba. The rhymes are repeated according to the refrains.Sestina
The sestina is a tightly structured French verse form consisting
of six sestets (six-line stanzas) and a three-line envoy. Widely
acknowledged to be one of the most complicated of verse forms,
the sestina originated in medieval Provence. The six terminal
words of the first stanza (1-2-3-4-5-6) are repeated in a
specific and complex pattern as the terminal words in each of
the succeeding stanzas:
6-1-5-2-4-3
3-6-4-1-2-5
5-3-2-6-1-4
4-5-1-3-6-2
2-4-6-5-3-1
5-3-1
2-4-6
The envoyís terminal words follow the pattern 5-3-1 (and to
make the form even more difficult, the other three terminal
words from the preceding stanzas must appear in the middle of
each of the three envoy lines in a 2-4-6 pattern). Despite the
complexity of this form, poets representing diverse artistic
movements and styles from different historical epochs have used
it successfully. Practitioners include Sir Philip Sidney,
Algernon Charles Swinburne, Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, and W.
H. Auden.
2
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
To An Athlete Dying Young
THE time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
5
To-day, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
10
15
20
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's.
-- A. E. Housman.
3
25
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
Elegy for Jane
My Student, Thrown by a Horse
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her;
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
5
10
15
If only I could nudge you from this sleep
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter
Neither father nor lover.
20
--Theodore Roethke
4
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
Ode On A Grecian Urn
John Keats
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? 10
5
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit dities of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
15
20
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unweari-ed,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
25
30
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
35
40
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
45
50
5
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
Ode to My Socks
Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
that she knit with her
shepherd's hands.
Two socks as soft
as rabbit fur.
I thrust my feet
inside them
as if they were
two
little boxes
knit
from threads
of sunset
and sheepskin.
Nevertheless
I fought
the sharp temptation
to put them away
the way schoolboys
put
fireflies in a bottle,
the way scholars
hoard
holy writ.
I fought
the mad urge
to lock them
in a golden
cage
and feed them birdseed
and morsels of pink melon
every day.
Like jungle
explorers
who deliver a young deer
of the rarest species
to the roasting spit
then wolf it down
in shame,
I stretched
my feet forward
and pulled on
those
gorgeous
socks,
and over them
my shoes.
My feet were
two woolen
fish
in those outrageous socks,
two gangly,
navy-blue sharks
impaled
on a golden thread,
two giant blackbirds,
two cannons:
thus
were my feet
honored
by
those
heavenly
socks.
They were
so beautiful
I found my feet
unlovable
for the very first time,
like two crusty old
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that embroidered
fire,
those incandescent
socks.
So this is
the moral of my ode:
beauty is beauty
twice over
and good things are doubly
good
when you're talking about a pair of wool
socks
in the dead of winter.
--Pablo Neruda
6
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent,
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
5
Then practice losing farther, losing faster;
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two river, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
10
15
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
--Elizabeth Bishop
7
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
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.
5
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.
Dylan Thomas, 1952
8
10
15
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
Paysage Moralisé
Hearing of harvests rotting in the valleys,
Seeing at end of street the barren mountains,
Round corners coming suddenly on water,
Knowing them shipwrecked who were launched for islands,
We honour founders of these starving cities
Whose honour is the image of our sorrow,
Which cannot see its likeness in their sorrow
That brought them desperate to the brink of valleys;
Dreaming of evening walks through learned cities
They reined their violent horses on the mountains,
Those fields like ships to castaways on islands,
Visions of green to them who craved for water.
They built by rivers and at night the water
Running past windows comforted their sorrow;
Each in his little bed conceived of islands
Where every day was dancing in the valleys
And all the green trees blossomed on the mountains,
Where love was innocent, being far from cities.
But dawn came back and they were still in cities;
No marvelous creature rose up from the water’
There was still gold and silver in the mountains
But hunger was a more immediate sorrow,
Although to moping villages in valleys
Some waving pilgrims were describing islands…
‘The gods,’ they promised, ‘visit us from islands,
Are stalking, head up, lovely, through our cities;
Now is the time to leave your wretched valleys
And sail with them across the lime-green water.
Sitting at their white sides, forget your sorrow,
The shadow cast across your lives by mountains.’
So many, doubtful, perished in the mountains,
Climbing up crags to get a view of islands,
So many, fearful, took with them their sorrow
Which stayed them when they reached unhappy cities,
So many, careless dived and drowned in water
So many, wretched, would not leave their valleys.
It is our sorrow. Shall it melt? Then water
Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys,
And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.
-- W. H. Auden (1933)
9
Ode, Elegy, Sestina, Villanelle
Sestina: Bob
According to her housemate, she is out with Bob
tonight, and when she’s out with Bob
you never know when she’ll get in. Bob
is an English professor. Bob
used to be in a motorcycle gang, or something, or maybe Bob
rides a motorcycle now. How radical of you, Bob—
I wish I could ride a motorcycle, Bob,
and also talk about Chaucer intelligently. Bob
is very tall, bearded, reserved. I saw Bob
at a poetry reading last week—he had such a Boblike poise—so quintessentially Bob!
The leather jacket, the granny glasses, the beard—Bob!
and you were with my ex-girlfriend, Bob!
And you’re a professor, and I’m nobody, Bob,
nobody, just a flower-deliverer, Bob,
and a skinny one at that, Bob—
and you are a large person, and I am small, Bob,
and I hate my legs, Bob,
but why am I talking to you as if you were here, Bob?
I’ll try to be more objective. Bob
is probably a nice guy. Or that’s what one hears. Bob
is not, however, the most passionate person named Bob
you’ll ever meet. Quiet, polite, succinct, Bob
opens doors for people, is reticent in grocery stores. Bob
does not talk about himself excessively to girlfriends. Bob
does not have a drinking problem. Bob
does not worry about his body, even though he’s a little heavy.
has never been in therapy. Bob,
also, though, does not have tenure—ha ha ha—and Bob
cannot cook as well as I can. Bob
Bob
never even heard of paella, and if he had, Bob
would not have changed his facial expression at all. Bob
is just so boring, and what I can’t understand, Bob—
yes I’m talking to you again, is why you, Bob,
could be more desirable than me. Granted, Bob,
you’re more stable, you’re older, more mature maybe but Bob . . .
(Months later, on the Bob-front: My former girlfriend finally married Bob.
Of Bob, she says, “No one has taken me higher or lower than Bob.”
Me? On a dark and stormy sea of Bob-thoughts, desperately, I bob.)
-- Jonah Winter
10