I Ode U

I’m still skipping sonnets

But it’s spring here in the Pacific Northwest, and I’ve been reminded that it’s time to explore another classic form: the ode.

Odes were once so numerous that their name became a synonym for “poem.” And who hasn’t heard an over-dramatized “Ode To [a thing you don’t particularly care about, with adjectives]?” But odes, like most formal poetry, can be a great way to explore the world around you, and to focus on and communicate a specific idea or image. So what’s an ode, really?

An ode is a type of lyrical poetry written in stanzas with no upper length limit (but it can also be as short as one stanza) and two requirements:

1. Substantively, it praises something. This can be a person, place, thing, or even an idea. It might be “spring” or “my dog” but it’s a poem celebrating something you find meaningful.
2. Structurally, it takes one of three forms: Pindaric, Horatian, or Sapphic. Since Pindaric odes require music and a sports theme, and Horatian odes are in formal rhyming quatrains (which we’ve done a lot of lately), we’ll focus on the Sapphic form this month.

So follow along as we explore the content and style of a Sapphic ode.

What’s it all about?

Like all odes, Sapphic odes celebrate something meaningful to the writer. If you want to follow in Sappho’s footsteps, you might like to celebrate a loved one, but really anything is fair game.

The point is to describe what about the person, place, thing or concept you find laudable. (Seasons are concepts, love is a concept, beauty itself is a concept, basically anything constructed by humans to make sense of and quantify the world around them is a concept.) Check out these dramatic lines from Wordsworth:

“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; —”

Or these, from Arthur O’Shaughnessy:

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;
World losers and world forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

While neither of those is written in the form we’re exploring, you can see how the poem is intended to lift up and exalt something. You can also see that odes are typically written in the first person, sharing the point of view of a narrator, usually the author. So… do that. But use this form:

Ok, what’s the hard part?

The hard part, as usual, is the structure of the poem. Before I start explaining, take a minute to read through some Sapphic verses. A lot of them. Just read as many as you need to in order to get the point, ok?

As you can see, Sapphic odes are made of four-line stanzas which do not have to rhyme. That’s the one mercy. It gets harder from there on in, so we’ve put together a couple options for structuring your Sapphic ode. Let’s take them easiest to hardest.

Just the syllables, ma’am.

A Sapphic stanza has three lines of eleven syllables each, and a fourth line of five syllables which re-states or reinforces a concept in one of the preceding lines, called the Adonic line. You don’t need to rhyme, so as long as you’ve counted your syllables correctly and your topic is appropriate, you’re good to go.

Raising the bar

If you want to step it up, you can add the scansion requirement to your plain syllable count. You’ll still need to elevate a subject, and you still don’t have to rhyme. If you don’t remember how to scan a poem, this is a good time to brush up on it. If you’re better at videos, check this one out. We’re about to move beyond iambic pentameter and play with some other cool metric feet.

Iambs, you’ll remember, are are written ” u / ” and are two-beat metric feet that pair an unstressed and stressed syllable.  Instead of using iambs, Sapphic verses are composed of trochees, spondees and dactyls.

• Trochees are the opposite of iambs: a two-beat foot with the accent on the first syllable written like so: ” / u “
• Spondees are also two-beat feet, with both syllables accented: ” / / “
• Dactyls are a three-beat foot, with the accent on the first beat: ” / u u “

If you listened to a lot of rap in the late 80’s an early 90’s, you already know how a dactyl works: It’s the word “lyrical.” See how those three beats fit into the same space as two? Okay. For what I am about to do I apologize deeply, but Ice, Ice, Baby is actually a pretty great (because the beats are oversimplified and heavily emphasized) way to look at trochees and dactyls. So, here’s the video. If you start listening at 0:40, look for “melody” and “felony” – those are both dactyls. “I’m a lyrical poet” is a trochee, a dactyl, and another trochee. Hear it?  /u /uu /u.

Okay. Sorry about that. Now you know what a trochee and a dactyl are and you’re also scarred for life.

So let’s see what that means for Sapphic odes:

Just like I described in the simplified version, each stanza of a Sapphic ode has four lines. The first three lines have eleven syllables each and the fourth line (called the Adonic line) has five syllables and repeats or clarifies an idea in the first three lines. Here’s where it gets complicated: Classical Greek doesn’t have stressed and unstressed syllables. Instead, it has long and short syllables, which we treat as stressed and unstressed. To make it MORE complicated, some of the syllables in a Sapphic verse are permitted to be either long or short.

If you write that out using normal scansion notation where “u” is an unstressed syllable and “/” is a stressed syllable, BUT, “x” is an optional stressed/unstressed syllable, here’s what it looks like.

Let’s break that up into metric feet, and put some names to it.

Important aside: just because these syllabic sets exist, you don’t have to match them to words. You’re not looking for a five word line where four of the words have two syllables. You’re listening for how all the words in the line match up with their stressed and unstressed syllables. See again “I’m a lyrical poet.” “I’m a” is two words and “poet” is one, but they both make up trochaic feet.

The first three lines of the sapphic usually contain two trochees, a dactyl, and then two more trochees. The fourth, and final, line is composed of one dactyl followed by a trochee.

You can also use spondees, replacing the x with an accented syllable:

Or mix it up:

You still don’t have to rhyme, though. We’re cool, right? We’re cool. Now let’s look at the hardest possible iteration.

Lyrical. The most lyricalest.

To really perfect a Sapphic verse, the hendecasyllabic lines should read in three parts, not four or five. That is, the first two trochees (or trochee/spondee pairs) should read with a natural pause between that and the dactyl, and another natural pause before the concluding four syllables of the line.

Here’s a pair of verses illustrating the difference between a four-part and three-part line. These are not my verses and I frankly dislike the last couplet of the first verse but at least you can hear the change in beat:

1. Four-beat:
Conquering Sappho’s not an easy business:
Masculine ladies cherish independence.
Only good music penetrates the souls of
Lesbian artists.

2. Three-beat:
Independent metre is overrated:
What’s the point if nobody knows the dance-form?
Wisely, Sappho chose to create a stately
regular stanza.

Make sense? See how the three-beat lines are more lyrical and lilting? Yes, it’s an order of magnitude harder, but it’s worth a try, as long as you’re counting meter anyway.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, remember you can always dial your poem back to just counting syllables. Start with something you love, talk about it in 11, 11, 11, and 5 (repeating an idea) syllables, and you’re done.

Good luck!

About the author:

Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.

rowan@yeahwrite.me