It was a strange misconception that led people for centuries to use the word "Pindaric" and irregular as synonymous terms; whereas the very essence of the odes of Pindar (of the few, alas! which survive to us) is their regularity. There is no more diffi cult form of poetry than this, and for this reason : when in any poetical composition the metres are varied, there must be a reason for such freedom, and that reason is properly subjective—the varying form must embody and express the varying emotions of the singer. But when these metrical variations are governed by no subjective law at all, but by arbitrary rules, supposed to be evolved from the practice of Pindar, then that very variety which should aid the poet in expressing his emotion crystallizes it and makes the ode the most frigid of all compositions. Great as Pindar undoubtedly is, it is deeply to be regretted that no other poet survives to represent the triumphal ode of Greece— the digressions of his subject matter are so wide, and his volubility is so great.
The great difficulty of the English ode is that of preventing the apparent spontaneity of the impulse from being marred by the apparent artifice of the form; for, assuredly, no writer sub sequent to Coleridge and to Keats would dream of writing an ode on the cold Horatian principles adopted by Warton, and even by Collins, in his beautiful "Ode to Evening." Fervour being absolutely essential, we think, to a great Eng lish ode, fluidity of metrical movement can never be dispensed with. The more billowy the metrical waves the better suited are they to render the emotions expressed by the ode, as the reader will see by referring to Coleridge's "Ode to France" (the finest ode in the English language according to Shelley), and giving special attention to the first stanza—to the way in which the first metrical wave, after it has gently fallen at the end of the first quatrain, leaps up again on the double rhymes (which are expressly introduced for this effect), and goes bounding on, billow after billow, to the end of the stanza. Not that this fine
ode is quite free from the great vice of the English ode, rhetoric. If we except Spenser, and in one instance Collins, it can hardly be said that any English writer before Shelley and Keats pro duced odes independent of rhetoric and supported by pure poetry alone. But fervid as are Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and Keats's odes "To a Nightingale" and "On a Grecian Urn" they are entirely free from rhetorical flavour. Notwithstanding that in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" the first stanza does not match in rhyme arrangement with the others, while the second stanza of the "Ode to a Nightingale" varies from the rest by running on four rhyme-sounds instead of five, vexing the ear at first by disappointed expectation, these two odes are, after Coleridge's "France," the finest regular odes perhaps in the English language.
The main other varieties of lyrical poetry, such as the idyll, the satire, the ballad, the sonnet, etc., are treated in separate articles.