Who Loves the Ode?

The ode has become a clichéd and often poorly imitated form of poetry, frequently written by students in high school English classes and lovable losers in teen dramas. But is the form, as written during its heyday, an effective method of capturing the nature of an object or concept by personification? The poetry of John Keats, who wrote odes long before they became cliché, demonstrates that the personification of inanimate objects is an effective tool for allowing the reader to obtain a closer connection to that object. In the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats breathes life and relevance into an ancient piece of pottery by casting it as an eternal observer that has existed through the ages. He uses flowery language to subtly express this point
“Thou, silent from, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!”
The urn is not just an object, it is a chronicler of human history, a monument to human history “a friend to man”.
In Ode to a Nightingale Keats uses the nightingale as a framework in which he lays out his own concerns about mortality. Again this use of the ode is not silly, clichéd or laughable; rather it is a valuable construct for the examination of a serious subject. Keats explains that while the nightingale itself may be mortal, its song is eternal
“The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days be emperor and clown”
The narrator sees his own mortality reflected in the fleeting nature of the nightingale’s song, but he places his own brief existence into a cosmic continuum of existences in order to give it a greater meaning. The ode is only an ineffective and laughable form of poetry when a particular ode does not have any greater meaning. If one were to write an ode to a pencil and refer only to its physical characteristics, the poem would indeed be cliché. But if one writes an ode to a pencil and relates the object to the struggles or emotions of the human experience, then that ode has just as much meaning as any other piece of poetry.