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The Tradition of the Ode

The ode is a type of lyric poetry that originated with the ancient Greek poets Horace and Pindar. They developed this form as a way to convey emotion, typically in response to an event, person, object, or idea. Greek odes were typically performed to music. They were also strict in terms of meter and typically involved a formal division into three parts known as the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. When early modern writers such as Edmund Spenser took up this tradition, they adapted it for their own use. They abandoned the formal requirements of the Greek models, but they retained the idea of the ode as a song that responds with a degree of seriousness appropriate to its subject. Spenser, for example, conceived his 1595 ode “Epithalamion” as a marriage song for his new bride. Odes continued to appear in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but they took on new importance for the British Romantic poets. Wordsworth’s ode stands among the best of the Romantic period. However, it’s also a curious outlier in the way the object of the ode, immortality, is an abstraction that the speaker can approach only indirectly, through subtle “intimations.”

The Pastoral Tradition

Of all the British Romantic poets, Wordsworth is arguably the one whose representation of the natural world is most closely associated with the tradition of pastoral poetry. This tradition goes back to Greek and Roman antiquity, when poets from urban centers like Athens and Rome wrote poems that conjured highly idealized images of rural life’s peaceful simplicity. A key element in pastoral poetry is the gently-rolling country landscape, the chief inhabitant of which is the shepherd, who idly tends his flock while singing songs and amorously pursuing beautiful nymphs. The idealized pastoral landscape contrasts sharply with the city. Whereas the city is associated with the frustrating complexities of social and political life, the country comes to be seen as a place of leisure, pleasure, and abundant natural wealth. Pastoral poetry largely fell out of favor following the collapse of the Roman Empire, only to be revived by Renaissance poets, from whom Wordsworth later inherited the tradition. This inheritance is clearly visible in “Intimations of Immortality,” where the speaker inhabits an idyllic countryside with joyfully singing birds, gamboling lambs, and a “happy Shepherd-boy.” Yet Wordsworth also complicates the pastoral tradition in this poem, where the beauty of rural life sponsors feelings of alienation and grief in the speaker.

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