ode

ode, elaborate and stately lyric poem of some length. The ode dates back to the Greek choral songs that were sung and danced at public events and celebrations. The Greek odes of Pindar, which were modeled on the choral odes of Greek drama, were poems of praise or glorification. They were arranged in stanzas patterned in sets of three—a strophe and an antistrophe, which had an identical metrical scheme, and an epode, which had a structure of its own. The ode of the Roman poets Horace and Catullus employed the simpler and more personal lyric form of Sappho, Anacreon, and Alcaeus (see lyric). The ode in later European literature was conditioned by both the Pindaric and the Horatian forms. During the Renaissance the ode was revived in Italy by Gabriello Chiabrera and in France most successfully by Ronsard. Ronsard imitated Pindar in odes on public events and Horace in more personal odes. Horatian odes also influenced the 17th-century English poets, especially Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, and Andrew Marvell. Milton's ode "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (1629) shows the influence of Pindar, as do the poems written for public occasions by his contemporary Abraham Cowley. However, the Cowleyan (or irregular) ode, originated by Cowley, disregarded the complicated metrical and stanzaic structure of the Pindaric form and employed freely altering stanzas and varying lines. In general the odes of the 19th-century romantic poets—Keats, Shelley, Coleridge—and of such later poets as Swinburne and Hopkins tend to be much freer in form and subject matter than the classical ode. Notable examples of the three kinds of ode are: Pindaric ode, e.g., Thomas Gray's "The Progress of Poesy"; Horatian ode, e.g., Keats's "To Autumn"; Cowleyan ode, e.g., Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Although the ode has been seldom used in the 20th cent., Allen Tate in "Ode on the Confederate Dead" and Wallace Stevens in "The Idea of Order at Key West" made successful, and highly personal, use of the form.

Bibliography

See studies by C. Maddison (1960), G. N. Shuster (1965), R. Shafer (1918, repr. 1966), J. D. Jump (1974), and P. H. Fry (1980).

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ode

Ceremonious lyric poem on an occasion of dignity in which personal emotion and universal themes are united. The form is usually marked by exalted feeling and style, varying line length, and complex stanza forms. The term ode derives from a Greek word alluding to a choric song, usually accompanied by a dance. Forms of odes include the Pindaric ode, written to celebrate public events such as the Olympic games, and the form associated with Horace, whose intimate, reflective odes have two- or four-line stanzas and polished metres. Both were revived during the Renaissance and influenced Western lyric poetry into the 20th century. The ode (qasidah) also flourished in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.

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Ode - An Object-Oriented Database from AT&T which extends C++ and supports fast queries, complex application modelling and multimedia. Ode uses one integrated data model (C++ classes) for both database and general purpose manipulation. An Ode database is a collection of persistent objects. It is defined, queried and manipulated using the language O++. O++ programs can be compiled with C++ programs, thus allowing the use of existing C++ code. O++ provides facilities for specifying transactions, creating and manipulating persistent objects, querying the database and creating and manipulating versions. The Ode object database provides four object compatible mechanisms for manipulating and querying the database. As well as O++ there are OdeView - an X Window System interface; OdeFS (a file system interface allowing objects to be treated and manipulated like normal Unix files); and CQL++, a C++ variant of SQL for easing the transition from relational databases to OODBs such as Ode. Ode supports large objects (critical for multimedia applications). Ode tracks the relationship between versions of objects and provides facilities for accessing different versions. Transactions can be specified as read-only; such transactions are faster because they are not logged and they are less likely to deadlock. 'Hypothetical' transactions allow users to pose "what-if" scenarios (as with spreadsheets). EOS, the storage engine of Ode, is based on a client-server architecture. EOS supports concurrency based on multi-granularity two-version two-phase locking; it allows many readers and one writer to access the same item simultaneously. Standard two-phase locking is also available. Ode supports both a client-server mode for multiple users with concurrent access and a single user mode giving improved performance. Ode 3.0 is currently being used as the multimedia database engine for AT&T's Interactive TV project. Ode 2.0 has also been distributed to more than 80 sites within AT&T and more than 340 universities. Ode is available free to universities under a non-disclosure agreement. The current version, 3.0, is available only for Sun SPARCstations running SunOS 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.3. Ode is being ported to Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 95 and SGI platforms. E-mail: Narain Gehani <nhg@research.att.com>.