Prompt: Odes to Common Things

Neruda

Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda decided in his late forties that he would commit himself to write an ode a week. Eventually, he produced 225 odes.

Neruda conceived his odes as an homage to common things that he encountered frequently and might have otherwise overlooked. He wrote about an artichoke, clouds, the moon and onions.

In his "Ode To The Onion," he writes of this "luminous flask" that:

...in the secrecy of the dark earth

your belly grew round with dew.

Under the earth

the miracle

happened

and when your clumsy

green stem appeared,

and your leaves were born

like swords

in the garden...

You make us cry without hurting us...

and the fragrance of the earth lives

in your crystalline nature.

We referenced Neruda's "Ode to Broken Things" in an earlier prompt that featured Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "The God Of Broken Things." But Neruda almost exclusively chose as his topics real things. One of the broken things in that poem is a clock.

And that clock

whose sound

was

the voice of our lives,

the secret

thread of our weeks,

which released

one by one, so many hours

for honey and silence

for so many births and jobs,

that clock also

fell

and its delicate blue guts

vibrated

among the broken glass

its wide heart

unsprung.

Are Neruda's odes classic odes? A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Greek odes were originally poetic pieces performed as a song or with musical accompaniment on aulos and the lyre.

To be a professor of poetry, I'll say that there are a number of odes forms including the Pindaric, Horatian, English and irregular - but I don't want you bogged down this month in forms that are overly restrictive. Still, many of you probably have discovered the way forms and structures can help a poem move forward.

Pindaric odes consist of three distinct stanzas (strophe, antistrophe, epode with the first two having the same meter and length, while the epode has a different meter and length) and it was very much meant to be used with music.

Horatian odes (from Horace's poetry) have rhyme and a specific stanza structure.

Irregular odes use rhyme but not a formal rhyme scheme and not the three-part form of the Pindaric ode, nor the two- or four-line stanza of the Horatian ode. It offers the most freedom. William Wordsworth and John Keats are two poets who extensively wrote irregular odes.  Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality" and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" or "Ode to a Nightingale."

All of those seem very formal to us today. So, I return to Pablo Neruda and his collected All the Odes to common things, such as his "Ode to My Socks."

...They were

so handsome

for the first time

my feet seemed to me

unacceptable

like two decrepit

firemen, firemen

unworthy

of that woven

fire,

of those glowing

socks...

Keats' odes to that urn or bird are also "common" objects that he saw in the course of his days. Don't make the mistake of assuming that because many contemporary odes are less classical in their form that they are less serious. Neruda's odes have been described as "the personal diary of a man in search of meaning who sings to life itself, to our connections to one another." Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" is an ode to the Platonic doctrine of "recollection" and John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" describes the timelessness of art, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" addresses the strength of nature. 

Neruda even tells us why those socks are worth observing.

The moral

of my ode is this:

beauty is twice

beauty

and what is good is doubly

good

when it is a matter of two socks

made of wool

in winter. 

 Deadline: Thursday, April 30, 2020

This month we ask you to write an ode to a common thing. It may be strictly done in one of the classic forms or a variation on a form. The ode form is about celebration and reverence and, though we may not accompany ours with music, they still describe or report using celebratory language and grand metaphors.

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