An ode is a lyric poem that speaks directly to a person, thing, place or idea and praises it, usually in a raised, serious voice and in elaborate stanzas. There are three classic kinds: the Pindaric ode, public and ceremonial, built from two matching stanzas and a third that differs; the Horatian ode, calm and private, in identical stanzas; and the irregular ode, whose stanzas change shape as the thought moves. The most famous examples of an ode poem are John Keats's odes of 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” and William Wordsworth's “Intimations” ode.
Each of the 14 examples below comes with a note on its shape and what it praises. Most of the ten classic odes are excerpts, so the label says which part you are reading, and it also marks translations and the four new odes written for this page.
| Kind | Shape | Voice | Odes |
|---|---|---|---|
| KindPindaric | ShapeStrophe and antistrophe in the same shape, then an epode in a different one | VoicePublic, ceremonial, for a victory or an occasion | Odes1–2 |
| KindHoratian | ShapeAny number of identical stanzas, often quatrains | VoicePrivate and calm, often to a friend | Odes3–6 |
| KindIrregular | ShapeStanzas of different lengths, lines of different lengths, rhyme where it falls | VoiceMeditative, changing mood | Odes7–8 |
| KindRomantic | ShapeA regular stanza the poet invents | VoiceIntense and personal, addressed to a thing | Odes9–12 |
| KindModern | ShapeAnything from one quatrain to a column of short lines | VoicePublic mourning, or praise of the ordinary | Odes13–14 |
Pindaric ode examples
The Greek poet Pindar wrote odes for winners at the great athletic festivals. They were sung by a chorus, most of them in groups of three stanzas: the strophe; the antistrophe, in exactly the same shape; and the epode, in a different one. An ancient tradition has the chorus turning one way for the strophe, back for the antistrophe and standing still for the epode. A victory ode praises the winner, the winner's family and city, tells a myth, and keeps stopping for short, hard maxims about luck and the gods.
Best is Water of all, and Gold as a flaming fire in the night shineth eminent amid lordly wealth; but if of prizes in the games thou art fain, O my soul, to tell, then, as for no bright star more quickening than the sun must thou search in the void firmament by day, so neither shall we find any games greater than the Olympic whereof to utter our voice:
Pindar starts by ranking the best things in the world (water, gold, the sun) to arrive at the best games of all, Olympia. That opening move has a name, the priamel: a run of comparisons that clears the stage for the real subject. Myers translated the odes into prose, so the triads disappear, but the voice survives: public, confident, sure that the occasion deserves the grandest words available.
English poets copied the voice and often mistook the form. Abraham Cowley's Pindarique Odes of 1656 used stanzas of any shape, which is how the irregular ode began. Thomas Gray's “The Progress of Poesy,” subtitled “A Pindaric Ode,” goes back to strict triads. A modern Pindaric needs only an occasion worth a crowd, a winner and the nerve to sound ceremonial about them.
Strophe
Begin with the rain, the muse of Saturdays,
which came down hard on Route 9
and on eleven girls in borrowed shin pads
and on the fathers holding coffee
under the one umbrella, and it did not stop
for the anthem, or the kickoff, or the score:
one all, with a minute left, and the light going.
Antistrophe
Then praise Rosa Delgado, twelve, left back,
who has never scored in her life,
who took the ball off their striker near halfway
because nobody else was there,
and looked up, and kept looking, and hit it
from thirty yards, so that it rose like a pigeon
let out of a kitchen, and came down inside the post.
Epode
Nothing is given twice in the same shape:
not the rain, not the field, not the girl
running with her shirt pulled over her face
toward a bench already running toward her.
Sing it now, before the mud dries on the shin pads,
before the van gets home and someone says next year.
What it praises is one goal and the girl who scored it, and each part shifts the focus the way Pindar's triads do. The strophe opens on an instruction to the singers (“Begin with the rain”) and looks wide: the road, eleven girls, the fathers under one umbrella, the score. The antistrophe (“Then praise Rosa Delgado”) narrows to the victor, by name and age, and her thirty-yard shot. The epode steps back to a maxim (“Nothing is given twice in the same shape”) that turns one goal into a thought about luck, then speaks to the singers again: “Sing it now.” The strophe and antistrophe both have seven lines in the same pattern of long and short; the epode breaks it with six. The rain stands in for the muse, which keeps the grand manner from tipping into parody.
Horatian ode examples
Horace, writing in Rome in the first century BCE, modeled his odes on Greek lyric poets such as Alcaeus and Anacreon and made them his own: short poems, most of them in one repeated stanza, often addressed to a friend, calm even when the subject is death. In English, a Horatian ode is any ode in identical stanzas, usually quiet and reflective.
Don’t ask (we may not know) what end the gods have given
to me, to you, Leuconoë, and don’t try the Babylonian numbers.
How much better to bear whatever comes, whether Jupiter
has granted us more winters or this one is the last,
the winter wearing out the Tyrrhenian sea against the rocks.
Be wise, strain the wine, and since the time is short,
cut long hope back. While we talk, jealous time
will have run off. Pluck the day, and trust tomorrow as little as you can.
The last line in Latin is carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Carpe is a harvest verb, to pick or pluck, so the famous advice is closer to “gather the day like fruit” than to “seize” it. The “Babylonian numbers” are horoscopes. Notice the Horatian manner: a named friend, an ordinary instruction (strain the wine), a winter sea, and the largest subject there is, said quietly.
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.
Blest, who can unconcernedly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,
Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixed; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please,
With meditation.
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
Five identical stanzas, each three long lines and a short one rhymed ABAB, and a subject straight from Horace: the happy man who wants nothing beyond his own fields. The short fourth lines do the work. Each one lands like a small full stop (“In winter fire,” “With meditation”), and the last wishes for a grave nobody can find. If you want a first ode, this is a good shape to imitate.
Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A favourite has no friend!
From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.
A mock ode: seven identical six-line stanzas spend the full machinery of the form (nymphs, sea gods, Fate) on a cat called Selima who falls into a tub of goldfish while reaching for one. The joke depends on the form being played straight. The moral at the end, adapted from the proverb that all that glisters is not gold, is solemn, neat and absurd.
Put down the phone. The inbox keeps:
it kept through flu, it kept through June,
and nothing in it ever sleeps
or ripens. Come outside. The moon
is up already, pale as chalk,
above the parking lot. The grill
is lit. Your brother wants to talk.
The kids are fighting. Sit. Be still.
No one at forty-one has learned
what any tree in autumn knows:
the leaf that waits to be confirmed
falls anyway. The evening goes
whether you answer it or not.
So answer this: the plate, the chair,
the corn your mother overbought,
the minute that is only there.
Horace's ode to Leuconoë, moved to a backyard: four identical quatrains in iambic tetrameter, a named friend, homely things (the grill, the corn) and a carpe diem at the end. The sentences run across the stanza breaks, which keeps the strict pattern from sounding like a greeting card. “Confirmed” and “learned” are a slant rhyme, chosen because the office word should feel slightly out of place.
Irregular ode examples
The irregular ode keeps the ode's raised voice and drops the matching stanzas. Each stanza takes the length the thought needs, line lengths swing from two beats to six, and rhymes arrive irregularly. Wordsworth revived Cowley's loose Pindaric for the “Intimations” ode.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
…
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!
In nine lines the first stanza runs from two beats (“To me did seem”) to six (the long last line), and the rhymes fall where they fall: stream, seem, dream; sight, light; yore, more. The shape follows the feeling, swelling on the memory and shrinking on the loss. Stanza V offers the poem's answer, that children remember a heaven adults forget, and the irregular form lets that answer arrive at its own length.
I
O house that lends, and asks for nothing back
except the thing itself, a little late,
I’ve come in from the rain again
to stand inside your humming light
with my wet coat and my overdue
history of the Franklin ships, lost in the white,
while the ceiling says, the way it says each night,
the library will close.
II
Not yet. The man asleep in Periodicals
is halfway through a dream.
The girl beside the window has two pages left
of something making her furious.
The fish tank in Children’s bubbles for no one,
and the returns slot, in the dark, swallows once.
III
I learned to read in you.
I learned that silence has a smell,
carpet and radiator and glue,
and that a woman with a stamp would trust
a nine-year-old with Narnia for three weeks.
IV
So let them cut your hours. Let them close
on Sundays, sell the bookmobile, turn down the heat.
I will be here at ten to nine
with something overdue,
and you will take it back and ask me nothing
and let me out into the rain.
Four stanzas of eight, six, five and six lines, each a different mood: arrival, the room, a memory, a vow. The opening “O” is apostrophe, the ode's oldest move, and the guide to literary devices in poetry shows it at work in Donne. Rhyme turns up irregularly (light, white, night), and two words return at the end, “overdue” and “rain,” to tie the last stanza back to the first.
The great Romantic odes
Keats and Shelley wrote the odes most people mean by the word. Their stanzas are regular, like Horace's, but invented for the poem, and their feeling is anything but calm. Keats built his ten-line ode stanza largely from sonnet parts, a Shakespearean quatrain followed by a Petrarchan sestet, as the sonnet examples show in their original setting.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Each of the five sections is fourteen lines of terza rima, four interlocking tercets (aba bcb cdc ded) and a couplet, so the ode is built from five sonnet-length sections. The first three praise the wind's power over leaf, cloud and wave. In the last, the speaker asks to become what he has been praising, and the final question turns a season into a hope.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
(Stanza 8 begins:) Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
The bird is immortal because its song is the same song, heard by emperors and by Ruth in the Bible, far from home in a foreign field. Look at the shape: ten lines, with the eighth cut short to three beats, a hitch before the stanza's last sweep. Then the final word, “forlorn,” becomes the first word of the next stanza and calls the speaker back to himself. One repeated word can be a turn.
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.
The rhymes show the sonnet parts: brede, overwrought, weed, thought (ABAB), then a six-line close (CDEDCE). After four stanzas spent with the figures carved on the urn, the speaker steps back and calls it cold, a beautiful object that outlasts every grief. Editions differ on where the quotation marks go, which is why readers still argue about whether the urn speaks the whole last two lines or only the first five words.
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-eves 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 o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
The last of the 1819 odes and the calmest. Keats lengthened his stanza to eleven lines, and the three stanzas move through the season and the day: ripening, then harvest, then the sounds of evening as the light goes. In the second stanza autumn becomes a person, a reaper asleep in the furrow, a gleaner, a watcher at the cider press. There is no moral. The praise is entirely in the particulars: the gourd, the hazel shells, the swath the hook spares, the swallows gathering to leave.
Modern ode examples
In the twentieth century the ode went two ways. One kept its public voice for grief shared by a whole country. The other turned the praise downward, to things too ordinary to have been praised before.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Binyon's poem is an ode for the dead of the First World War, and its fourth stanza is recited on its own at remembrance services, where it is often called simply the Ode. It shows how close the ode and the elegy sit: this is praise of the dead, spoken by the living in the future tense. The short last line is the one a crowd repeats.
The other direction belongs above all to Pablo Neruda. His Odas elementales (Elemental Odes, 1954) and the books of odes that followed praise everyday things, a cat among them, in narrow columns of very short lines. Neruda's odes are still in copyright, so the example below is a new poem in that tradition.
You came
from the drugstore,
from the spinning rack
between the batteries
and the birthday cards,
three pairs
for twelve dollars,
and I resented you.
I was forty-four.
I held the menu
at arm’s length
like a waiter
holding out a check
that nobody wants.
Now look at you:
one pair by the bed,
one in the car,
one lost
somewhere in the couch
with the remote,
a quarter
and a raisin
from 2019.
You give me back
the small print
on the pill bottle,
the splinter
in my daughter’s thumb,
my mother’s handwriting,
the commas
in my own sentences,
the whole
fine-grained
world.
The short lines slow the reader down to the pace of looking, which is the point of an ode to glasses. It starts with resentment, which gives the praise somewhere to travel, and the turn comes at “You give me back,” where the list changes from where the glasses are to what they let the speaker see. The last three lines narrow to one word.
How to write an ode
The forms differ, but every ode on this page does the same five things. If you need a subject first, the list of poem ideas has plenty of ordinary things that have never had an ode.
- Choose something you can talk to
A person, a place, an object, a season, an hour of the day. Address it directly, as “you” or with an “O,” the way Keats speaks to the urn. Apostrophe is one of the oldest rhetorical devices, and it turns description into a relationship.
- Praise with particulars
Before you draft, list twenty concrete things your subject does or holds. “To Autumn” praises with gourds, hazel shells and a cider press, not with “beautiful” or “abundant.” Be suspicious of any adjective a reader couldn't draw.
Once you have a draft, ask the Strokes Assistant which lines praise in abstractions rather than things, and test its list against your own.
- Match the form to the occasion
Pindaric for a public celebration, Horatian for a friend or a private pleasure, irregular for a meditation that changes its mind, short lines for something small. Whichever you choose, keep to it: matching stanzas should match, and an irregular ode's changes should follow the thought.
- Let the praise turn
Many odes change direction once: from the thing to what the speaker wants from it (Shelley's “Make me thy lyre”), from the present to time, or from praise to a doubt. A list of compliments with no turn can read like a greeting card.
- End on a wish, a vow or a maxim
Pindar often ends on a prayer or a maxim, Horace on advice, Shelley on a question, Pope on a wish for an unmarked grave. Write the last line last, once you know what the praise has cost or taught.
Ode, elegy, hymn or sonnet?
These forms overlap, and the useful distinction is purpose. One pair shows it. Keats's “To Autumn” and Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” both end a day in the fields, but Keats praises the dying light and the gathering swallows, while Gray mourns the villagers buried in the churchyard. Binyon's “For the Fallen” does both at once: it praises the dead it mourns.
| Form | What it does | Usual shape | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| FormOde | What it doesAddresses and praises | Usual shapeElaborate stanzas, Pindaric, Horatian or irregular | ExampleKeats, “To Autumn” |
| FormElegy | What it doesMourns someone or something | Usual shapeNo fixed form | ExampleGray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) |
| FormHymn | What it doesWorships, and is sung together | Usual shapeRegular stanzas, often common meter | Example“Amazing Grace” (1779) |
| FormSonnet | What it doesArgues and turns | Usual shapeFourteen lines | ExampleShakespeare, Sonnet 18 |
| FormBallad | What it doesTells a story | Usual shapeQuatrains of four and three beats | Example“Sir Patrick Spens” |
The sonnet and the ode are especially close relatives. Shelley built “Ode to the West Wind” out of sonnet-length sections, and Keats built his ode stanza out of sonnet parts. If you have written sonnets, you already have most of the tools an ode needs; the guide to writing a poem covers the rest, from images to line breaks.
Frequently asked questions
Does an ode have to rhyme?
No. Greek and Latin odes, including Pindar's and Horace's, did not rhyme; they were built on patterns of long and short syllables. Most English odes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century rhyme, and many modern odes, including Neruda's and two of the new odes on this page, do not.
How long is an ode?
There is no set length. Pope's "Ode on Solitude" is twenty lines, Keats's "To Autumn" thirty-three, and Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode runs for several pages. A first ode of three or four stanzas is plenty: long enough to praise, turn and end on a wish.
