Whom thunder's dismal noise,
And all that Prophets and Apostles louder spake,
And all the creatures' plain conspiring voice,
Could not, whilst they liv'd, awake,
This mightier sound shall make
When dead t' arise,
And open tombs, and open eyes,
To the long sluggards of five thousand years.
This mightier sound shall wake its hearers' ears.
Then shall the scatter'd atoms crowding come
Back to their ancient home.
Some from birds, from fishes some,
Some from earth, and some from seas,
Some from beasts, and some from trees.
Some descend from clouds on high,
Some from metals upwards fly,
And where th' attending soul naked and shivering stands,
Meet, salute, and join their hands,
As dispers'd soldiers at the trumpet's call
Haste to their colors all.
Unhappy most, like tortur'd men,
Their joints new set, to be new-rack'd again,
To mountains they for shelter pray;
The mountains shake, and run about no less confus'd than they.
Stop, stop, my Muse! allay thy vig'rous heat,
Kindled at a hint so great.
Hold thy Pindaric Pegasus closely in,
Which does to rage begin,
And this steep hill would gallop up with violent course;
'Tis an unruly and a hard-mouth'd horse,
Fierce, and unbroken yet,
Impatient of the spur or bit;
Now prances stately, and anon flies o'er the place;
Disdains the servile law of any settled pace;
Conscious and proud of his own natural force,
'Twill no unskilful touch endure,
But flings writer and reader too that sits not sure.
(COWLEY: _The Resurrection_, strophes iii. and iv. 1656).
Cowley, as has already appeared, introduced the irregular ode into
English poetry, calling it "Pindaric" under a misapprehension of the
real structure of the Greek odes. He published fifteen "Pindarique Odes"
in 1656 (see the Preface to these, in Grosart's edition of his works,
vol. ii. p. 4). The present specimen illustrates the really not
unskilful use which Cowley made of the varying cadences of the form, and
also sets forth--in the amusing concluding lines--his own idea of its
difficulties.
Under the influence of Cowley's odes, the new form speedily became
popular. According to Dr. Johnson, "this lax and lawless versification
so much concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the
laziness of the idle, that it immediately over-spread our books of
poetry; all the boys and girls caught the pleasing fashion, and they who
could do nothing else could write like Pindar." (_Life of Cowley_.)
Compare also the remarks of Mr. Gosse: "Until the days of Collins and
Gray, the ode modelled upon Cowley was not only the universal medium for
congratulatory lyrics and pompous occasional pieces, but it was almost
the only variety permitted to the melancholy generations over whom the
heroic couplet reigned supreme." (_Seventeenth Century Studies_, p.
216.)
It has been the habit of modern critics to treat the irregularities of
the Cowleyan ode with no little contempt, and it is undoubtedly true
that in the hands of small poets its liberties are dangerous; but it is
also true that some of the greatest modern poets have adopted the form
for some of their best work, and that they have generally preferred it
to that of the regular Pindaric ode.
When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound,
To raise the nations under ground;
When in the valley of Jehoshaphat
The judging God shall close the book of Fate,
And there the last assizes keep
For those who wake and those who sleep;
When rattling bones together fly
From the four corners of the sky;
When sinews o'er the skeletons are spread,
Those cloth'd with flesh, and life inspires the dead;
The sacred poets first shall hear the sound,
And foremost from the tomb shall bound,
For they are covered with the lightest ground;
And straight, with inborn vigor, on the wing,
Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing.
There thou, sweet saint, before the choir shalt go,
As harbinger of heaven, the way to show,
The way which thou so well hast learn'd below.
(DRYDEN: _To the Pious Memory of Mistress Anne Killigrew_, strophe x.
1686.)
See also specimen from the _Ode for St. Cecilia's Day_, quoted above, p.
52.
Dryden's odes for St. Cecilia's Day (especially the _Alexander's Feast_)
are among the most highly esteemed of his poems; but parts, at least, of
the ode on Mistress Killigrew are no less fine, and in this case we have
a purely literary ode, whose irregularities are not designed--as in the
case of the others--to fit choral rendering. The conclusion of the ode,
here quoted, seems to owe something of both substance and form to the
conclusion of Cowley's Resurrection Ode (see preceding specimen). Dr.
Johnson called Dryden's Killigrew Ode "undoubtedly the noblest ode that
our language ever has produced."
Last came Joy's ecstatic trial.
He, with viny crown advancing,
First to the lively pipe his hand addrest;
But soon he saw the brisk awak'ning viol,
Whose sweet entrancing voice he loved the best.
They would have thought, who heard the strain,
They saw in Tempe's vale her native maids,
Amidst the festal sounding shades,
To some unwearied minstrel dancing,
While, as his flying fingers kiss'd the strings,
Love fram'd with Mirth a gay fantastic round;
Loose were her tresses seen, her zone unbound,
And he, amidst his frolic play,
As if he would the charming air repay,
Shook thousand odors from his dewy wings.
(COLLINS: _The Passions._ 1746.)
I marked Ambition in his war-array!
I heard the mailed Monarch's troublous cry--
"Ah! wherefore does the Northern Conqueress stay!
Groans not her chariot on its onward way?"
Fly, mailed Monarch, fly!
Stunned by Death's twice mortal mace,
No more on murder's lurid face
The insatiate hag shall gloat with drunken eye!
Manes of the unnumbered slain!
Ye that gasped on Warsaw's plain!
Ye that erst at Ismail's tower,
When human ruin choked the streams,
Fell in conquest's glutted hour,
Mid women's shrieks and infants' screams!
Spirits of the uncoffined slain,
Sudden blasts of triumph swelling,
Oft, at night, in misty train,
Rush around her narrow dwelling!
The exterminating fiend is fled--
(Foul her life, and dark her doom)--
Mighty armies of the dead
Dance, like death-fires, round her tomb!
Then with prophetic song relate
Each some tyrant-murderer's fate!
(COLERIDGE: _Ode on the Departing Year_, strophe iii. 1796.)
This ode was evidently intended to be in the regular Pindaric form, and
was divided into strophes, antistrophes, and epodes; but it soon broke
into irregularity. On Coleridge's odes see some remarks by Mr. Theodore
Watts in the article on Poetry in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day....
O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest;
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:--
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man nor boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
(WORDSWORTH: _Intimations of Immortality_, strophes v. and ix. 1807.)
In this poem the English ode may be said to have reached its high-water
mark. Professor Corson observes: "The several metres are felt, in the
course of the reading of the Ode, to be organic--inseparable from what
each is employed to express. The rhymes, too, with their varying
degrees of emphasis, according to the nearness or remoteness, and the
length, of the rhyming verses, are equally a part of the expression....
The feelings of the reader of English poetry get to be set, so to speak,
to the pentameter measure, as in that measure the largest portion of
English poetry is written; and, accordingly, other measures derive some
effect from that fact. In the theme-metre, generally, the more
reflective portions of the Ode, its deeper tones, are expressed. The
gladder notes come in the shorter metres.... Wordsworth never wrote any
poem of which it can be more truly said than of his great Ode, 'Of the
soul the body form doth take.'" (_Primer of English Verse_, pp. 32-34.)
Then gentle winds arose
With many a mingled close
Of wild Æolian sound and mountain-odor keen;
And where the Baian ocean
Welters with airlike motion,
Within, above, around its bowers of starry green,
Moving the sea-flowers in those purple caves
Even as the ever stormless atmosphere
Floats o'er the Elysian realm,
It bore me like an Angel, o'er the waves
Of sunlight, whose swift pinnace of dewy air
No storm can overwhelm;
I sailed, where ever flows
Under the calm Serene
A spirit of deep emotion
From the unknown graves
Of the dead kings of Melody.
Shadowy Aornos darkened o'er the helm
The horizontal ether; heaven stripped bare
Its depths over Elysium, where the prow
Made the invisible water white as snow;
From that Typhæan mount, Inarime,
There streamed a sunlight vapor, like the standard
Of some ethereal host;
Whilst from the coast,
Louder and louder, gathering round, there wandered
Over the oracular woods and divine sea
Prophesyings which grew articulate--
They seize me--I must speak them--be they fate!
(SHELLEY: _Ode to Naples_, strophe ii. 1819.)
Bury the Great Duke
With an empire's lamentation,
Let us bury the Great Duke
To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation,
Mourning when their leaders fall,
Warriors carry the warrior's pall,
And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall.
Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore?
Here, in streaming London's central roar.
Let the sound of those he wrought for,
And the feet of those he fought for,
Echo round his bones for evermore.
Lead out the pageant: sad and slow,
As fits an universal woe,
Let the long long procession go,
And let the sorrowing crowd about it grow,
And let the mournful martial music blow;
The last great Englishman is low....
... We revere, and while we hear
The tides of Music's golden sea
Setting toward eternity,
Uplifted high in heart and hope are we,
Until we doubt not that for one so true
There must be other nobler work to do
Than when he fought at Waterloo,
And Victor he must ever be.
For though the Giant Ages heave the hill
And break the shore, and evermore
Make and break, and work their will;
Though world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us, each with different powers,
And other forms of life than ours,
What know we greater than the soul?
On God and Godlike men we build our trust.
Hush, the Dead March wails in the people's ears:
The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears:
The black earth yawns: the mortal disappears;
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;
He is gone who seemed so great.--
Gone; but nothing can bereave him
Of the force he made his own
Being here, and we believe him
Something far advanced in state,
And that he wears a truer crown
Than any wreath that man can weave him.
Speak no more of his renown,
Lay your earthly fancies down,
And in the vast cathedral leave him.
God accept him, Christ receive him.
(TENNYSON: _On the Death of the Duke of Wellington_, strophes i, ii,
iii, ix (in part). 1852.)
This ode of Tennyson's is one of the few poems in which he gave himself
such liberty of form (compare some of the irregular measures of _Maud_).
It shows his usual skill in the adaptation of metrical effects to the
purposes of description. Dr. Henry Van Dyke has suggested that the
varying--almost lawless--movements of the opening lines are designed to
suggest the surging of the crowd through the streets of London, before
the entrance into the cathedral for the funeral.
Bow down, dear Land, for thou hast found release!
Thy God, in these distempered days,
Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways,
And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace!
Bow down in prayer and praise!
No poorest in thy borders but may now
Lift to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow.
O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more,
Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair
O'er such sweet brows as never other wore,
And letting thy set lips,
Freed from wrath's pale eclipse,
The rosy edges of their smile lay bare,
What words divine of lover or of poet
Could tell our love and make thee know it,
Among the Nations bright beyond compare?
What were our lives without thee?
What all our lives to save thee?
We reck not what we gave thee;
We will not dare to doubt thee.
But ask whatever else, and we will dare!
(LOWELL: _Harvard Commemoration Ode_, strophe xii. 1865.)
This is undoubtedly the finest of odes by American poets, and remains
one of the glories of new-world poetry. Its irregular measures were
designed by Mr. Lowell to fit the poem for public reading (see his
letter to Mr. Gosse on the subject, quoted in the Appendix to Gosse's
_Seventeenth Century Studies_).
In the Year of the great Crime,
When the false English nobles and their Jew,
By God demented, slew
The Trust they stood thrice pledged to keep from wrong,
One said, Take up thy Song,
That breathes the mild and almost mythic time
Of England's prime!
But I, Ah, me,
The freedom of the few
That, in our free Land, were indeed the free,
Can song renew?
Ill singing 'tis with blotting prison-bars,
How high soe'er, betwixt us and the stars;
Ill singing 'tis when there are none to hear;
And days are near
When England shall forget
The fading glow which, for a little while,
Illumes her yet,
The lovely smile
That grows so faint and wan,
Her people shouting in her dying ear:
Are not jays twain worth two of any swan!
Harsh words and brief asks the dishonor'd Year.
(COVENTRY PATMORE: Ode ix. Printed 1868.)
Mr. Patmore's use of the irregular ode forms is of particular interest.
He made a special study of the form, and applied it more widely than is
commonly done. His first odes were printed (not published) in 1868, and
from one of these the present specimen is taken. Later (1877), in
connection with _The Unknown Eros_, he set forth his view of the ode
form, treating it not as lawless but as governed by laws of its own.
"Nearly all English metres," he said, "owe their existence as metres to
'catalexis,' or pause, for the time of one or more feet, and, as a rule,
the position and amount of catalexis, are fixed. But the verse in which
this volume is written is catalectic _par excellence_, employing the
pause (as it does the rhyme) with freedom only limited by the exigencies
of poetic passion. From the time of Drummond of Hawthornden to our own,
some of the noblest flights of English poetry have been taken on the
wings of this verse; but with ordinary readers it has been more or less
discredited by the far greater number of abortive efforts, on the part
sometimes of considerable poets, to adapt it to purposes with which it
has no expressional correspondence; or to vary it by rhythmical
movements which are destructive of its character. Some persons,
unlearned in the subject of this metre, have objected to this kind of
verse that it is 'lawless.' But it has its laws as truly as any other.
In its highest order, the lyric or 'ode,' it is a tetrameter, the line
having the time of eight iambics. When it descends to narrative, or the
expression of a less exalted strain of thought, it becomes a trimeter,
having the time of six iambics, or even a dimeter, with the time of
four; and it is allowable to vary the tetrameter 'ode' by the occasional
introduction of passages in either or both of these inferior measures,
but not, I think, by the use of any other. The license to rhyme at
indefinite intervals is counterbalanced ... by unusual frequency in the
recurrence of the same rhyme." (From Patmore's Prefatory Note to _The
Unknown Eros_; quoted by William Sharp, in the Introduction to _Great
Odes_, p. xxxii.)[40]
On the shores of a Continent cast,
She won the inviolate soil
By loss of heirdom of all the Past,
And faith in the royal right of Toil!
She planted homes on the savage sod:
Into the wilderness lone
She walked with fearless feet,
In her hand the divining-rod,
Till the veins of the mountains beat
With fire of metal and force of stone!
She set the speed of the river-head
To turn the mills of her bread;
She drove her ploughshare deep
Through the prairie's thousand-centuried sleep.
To the South, and West, and North,
She called Pathfinder forth,
Her faithful and sole companion
Where the flushed Sierra, snow-starred,
Her way to the sunset barred,
And the nameless rivers in thunder and foam
Channeled the terrible canyon!
Nor paused, till her uttermost home
Was built, in the smile of a softer sky
And the glory of beauty yet to be,
Where the haunted waves of Asia die
On the strand of the world-wide sea.
(BAYARD TAYLOR: _National Ode_, strophe iii. 1876.)
Soon shall the Cape Ann children shout in glee,
Spying the arbutus, spring's dear recluse;
Hill lads at dawn shall hearken the wild goose
Go honking northward over Tennessee;
West from Oswego to Sault Sainte-Marie,
And on to where the Pictured Rocks are hung,
And yonder where, gigantic, willful, young,
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates,
With restless violent hands and casual tongue
Moulding her mighty fates,
The Lakes shall robe them in ethereal sheen;
And like a larger sea, the vital green
Of springing wheat shall vastly be outflung
Over Dakota and the prairie states.
By desert people immemorial
On Arizonan mesas shall be done
Dim rites unto the thunder and the sun;
Nor shall the primal gods lack sacrifice
More splendid, when the white Sierras call
Unto the Rockies straightway to arise
And dance before the unveiled ark of the year,
Sounding their windy cedars as for shawms,
Unrolling rivers clear
For flutter of broad phylacteries;
While Shasta signals to Alaskan seas
That watch old sluggish glaciers downward creep
To fling their icebergs thundering from the steep,
And Mariposa through the purple calms
Gazes at far Hawaii crowned with palms
Where East and West are met,--
A rich seal on the ocean's bosom set
To say that East and West are twain,
With different loss and gain:
The Lord hath sundered them; let them be sundered yet....
... Ah no!
We have not fallen so,
We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know!
'Twas only yesterday sick Cuba's cry
Came up the tropic wind, 'Now help us, for we die!'
Then Alabama heard,
And rising, pale, to Maine and Idaho
Shouted a burning word.
Proud state with proud impassioned state conferred,
And at the lifting of a hand sprang forth,
East, west, and south, and north,
Beautiful armies. Oh, by the sweet blood and young,
Shed on the awful hill slope at San Juan,
By the unforgotten names of eager boys
Who might have tasted girls' love and been stung
With the old mystic joys
And starry griefs, now the spring nights come on,
But that the heart of youth is generous,--
We charge you, ye who lead us,
Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain!
Turn not their new-world victories to gain!
One least leaf plucked for chaffer from the bays
Of their dear praise,
One jot of their pure conquest put to hire,
The implacable republic will require.
(WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY: _An Ode in Time of Hesitation_, strophes iii. and
ix. 1900.)