An Ode to Himself
Where dost thou careless lie,
Buried in ease and sloth?
Knowledge that sleeps doth die;
And this security,
It is the common moth
That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.
Are all th’ Aonian springs
Dried up? lies Thespia waste?
Doth Clarius’ harp want strings,
That not a nymph now sings?
Or droop they as disgrac’d,
To see their seats and bowers by chatt’ring pies defac’d?
If hence thy silence be,
As ’tis too just a cause,
Let this thought quicken thee:
Minds that are great and free
Should not on fortune pause;
’Tis crown enough to virtue still, her own applause.
What though the greedy fry
Be taken with false baites
Of worded balladry,
And think it poesy?
They die with their conceits,
And only piteous scorn upon their folly waits.
Then take in hand thy lyre,
Strike in thy proper strain,
With Japhet’s line aspire
Sol’s chariot for new fire,
To give the world again;
Who aided him will thee, the issue of Jove’s brain.
And since our dainty age
Cannot endure reproof,
Make not thyself a page
To that strumpet, the stage,
But sing high and aloof,
Safe from the wolf’s black jaw and the dull ass’s hoof.
Ben Jonson wrote two odes to himself, both of them expanded varieties of the Horatian ode, and both declaring his disenchantment with the theatre. I’ve chosen the succinct and elegant An Ode to Himself, but the other poem, Ode to Himself (“Come leave the loathed stage”) is very much worth a look. It’s thought to have been occasioned by the failure of his play The New Inn in 1629.
I haven’t been able to find a composition date for An Ode to Himself. It could be a more polished, less vitriolic response to the same disappointment, but isn’t necessarily. Notwithstanding the success of his humours-inspired comedy writing, Jonson suffered various setbacks during his theatrical career. For example, he completed Thomas Nashe’s unfinished satire The Isle of Dogs, only to see the play suppressed for alleged sedition, and to receive a short jail sentence (a case of the “dainty age” being unable to “endure reproof”, perhaps). His tragedies were criticised for being overly reliant on classical models, and he was ridiculed for collecting and publishing the plays as “Workes”. While Jonson’s odes seem clearly to express intense personal sentiments, neither should be read as a permanent valediction to the stage. Despite the focus on poetry and criticism in later life, Jonson wrote four more plays, performed during the reign of Charles I. Two unfinished scripts were found among his papers at his death.
The first stanza of An Ode to Himself considers the wider implications of succumbing to “ease and sloth”: “Knowledge that sleeps doth die”. It doesn’t seem that his failure has plunged the speaker into depression, or not admittedly, but that he understands his continued stubborn “security” (confidence) in his own worth will be a threat if it allows stasis. And so in the next stanza he rhetorically questions the extinction of his sources of inspiration, referring to Aonia and Thespia, places associated with the muses, and to Clarius, site of the temple of Apollo. The “chatt’ring pies” originate from the myth in which the nine daughters of King Pierus are turned into magpies for daring to challenge the nine muses.
Jonson awards himself the realms of tragedy (Thespia) as well as those of poetry and music. His Ode continues on its gracefully majestic path of self-encouragement, pausing only to demote the youthful competitors, the “greedy fry”, flattered by the false praise of their inferior work. Japhet (stanza 5) is Prometheus, and the “issue of Jove’s brain”, Minerva. With both wisdom and the fire of inspiration, how can the author fail?
The last stanza suggests that it’s the response to the satirical writing that has prompted his disappointment, and that his wish is to attain a “higher”, non-worldly form of artistic expression. It’s fortunate that his talent overcame the prescription. While his tragedies are now generally forgotten, his verse still sings, insured against the critical wolves and asses by its human warmth as well as its formal excellence.
