In Search of Secrets

I never cared much for odes before. Maybe that’s only because all the odes I’d been exposed to were Keats’, and Keats’ odes seem a little…understated. Even melancholy, at times.

Now that I’ve learned more about the form (and now that I’m trying to write one of my own), that seems ridiculous. As I understand it, the whole point of an ode is to be over-the-top in your praise, to exult your subject, to be effusive, to be–well, a bit wild.

Maybe I’m not sophisticated enough to tell (or maybe I’ve just been reading all the wrong ones), but I’ve never seen a poem by Keats I would describe as “wild.”

I, on the other hand, am having so much fun being over-the-top.

I’d never realized before how much work I’m constantly putting into holding back when communicating strong feelings. Even in My Top Ten Rains, a poem specifically about feelings, I worked very hard to be understated: to show more than tell, to rely on the reader’s imagination to reconstruct my emotions from the blueprints I’d left on the page, rather than handing them over fully-formed.

And I think, for that piece, it was the right decision! I wanted the mood to be dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness; I wanted the reader to be able to imagine themselves in my place; I wanted them to actually feel some of those emotions rather than just reading about them. Even though the poem is about my own experiences, I didn’t want my ego (in either sense of the word) to be the main focus.

But ego is intrinsic to an ode! It’s not your opinion I’m trying to convey, it’s mine–with all the subjectivity, quirks, and uniquenesses that come with it…and it turns out part of that uniqueness is an intensity I hadn’t even realized I’d been concealing.

As a grown-up (and especially as a man), you’re not supposed to have strong feelings, let alone show them. But strong emotions aren’t wrong–in either the moral or epistemic sense.

Becoming more rational—arriving at better estimates of how-the-world-is—can diminish feelings or intensify them. Sometimes we run away from strong feelings by denying the facts, by flinching away from the view of the world that gave rise to the powerful emotion. If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and train yourself not to deny facts, your feelings will become stronger.

-Eliezer Yudkowsky, Feeling Rational

Of course, it’s still important not to overwhelm the people around you, especially when those strong feelings are about them. Luckily, this particular ode isn’t about a person, so I haven’t been holding back at all. It’s exhilarating!

…I should add that none of this means the poem will be any good. Don’t get your hopes up. But even if this ends up being the worst ode I ever write, I don’t think it will be the last.