Word: ode
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...unexpected frame of reference. Like ART'S recollection of the sad night in May, 1925, in the old Madison Square Garden, which was about to be demolished. There was Boxing Announcer Joe Humphreys, bellowing at the crowd with a genuine sob in his voice, delivering an ode to the Garden and the gilded copper nude that stood atop it: "Farewell to thee, O Temple of Fistiana, farewell to thee, O sweet Miss Diana...
Singer Bobbie Gentry, 23, may know the answer, but she isn't telling. Instead, the slim Mississippi farm girl is basking in the news that her Ode to Billie Joe, which she cut for Capitol Records on July 10, has passed the million-sales mark, and that her first LP album (including Billie Joe and eight other songs written and sung by her) has an initial run of 500,000 copies...
Thus such a subversive ditty as Sandy Shaw's Puppet on a String has been recast in Hungary as Paprika Puppet; the Spotniks' Walking Back to Happiness has become an ode to the joys of a country cottage, one of the most coveted status symbols among crowded Czech city dwellers. "The main problem with American lyrics is that they are too gushy for our listeners," says one member of the Text Writers' Circle, which supervises all song translations in Czechoslovakia. "Under our system we are conditioned to be less sentimental...
...three Horatian poems, the version of the Cleopatra ode (Nuncest bibendum, nunc pede libero/ pulsanda tellus ...) seems the best. The first stanza is ecstatic...
Lowell excusably makes no attempt to duplicate the intricate metrics of Horace; for the Alsaic stanzas of two of the odes he successfully substitutes short lines with a varying number of stresses. In the "Spring" ode, however, the meter of the original, a strange mixture of falling dactyls and trochees alternating with rising lambs is important for the poem's mixture of moods. Mr.Lowell substitutes a more regular series of five-stress lines, but supplies energy and excitement with repetition, and improves in at least one passage of typically Horatian philosophy by turning a flat statement into a metaphor...