Thought-Sequence in the Ode

A NCIENT lyric poetry falls into two main types: the Doric choir-song, and the Asiatic monody. Sir Maurice Bowra describes these types as fundamentally different in form, origin, style, and character, despite some interaction.' The choral ode, he says, was formal and artificial, designed to go with music and dance, concerned with a definite occasion, abounding in maxims and old tales, generally religious in its associations. Such was the work of Pindar and Bacchylides.2 The monody purported to be the utterance of one person, a recitation, concerned with individual feelings, derived from folk-songs of love and pleasure, informal in design.3 Many aspects of contrast between the choir-song and the monody could be discussed: e.g., structure (triads, as against stanzas or continuous lines), metre (correspondence in strophes and variations from triad to triad, as against stanzaic or single-line pattern), occasion (public, as against personal), tone (high style, as against informal), and so forth. This paper is concerned only with the pattern of thought, the arrangement of ideas in an ode. An attempt will be made to distinguish the formal ode from the personal song in terms of the sequence of ideas. The basic contrast will be between an architectural4 exposition of ideas-i.e., arrangement of thought in blocks corresponding to strophes and triads-and a linear or exposition-i.e., a development of thought through easy and natural links of association. Such a distinction is, in practice, largely theoretical. In early lyric the interaction to which Sir Maurice Bowra refers is already discernible. Pindar has experimented with modifications of strict thought-pattern. The monodists show signs of influence by formal styles. In Horace is to be found an apparently deliberate, and certainly a felicitous, compromise between formal structure and cursive thought-design. The distinctive charm of Horace is in large measure to be attributed to his skilful reconciliation of the two styles. The formal triadic Ode could be defined as units antithetically arranged-strophe and antistrophe-together with other membersepodes-which bind and reconcile the antithetical units.& Such is the a a' x, b b' y, c c' z scheme, where x y z are syntheses of a a', b b', c c'

Biology · Ode · Sequence (biology) · Applied Mathematics · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Historical and Literary Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Mathematics