Nov 12, 2009

Ode to My Socks | Introduction

Neruda's straightforward but elegant poetic celebration of a pair of woolen socks is one of many odes he wrote to pay homage to the ordinary material objects of daily existence. The poem, written in short, irregular lines of free verse, is poetry at its most pure and elemental, as it communicates in words that all people can understand a simple message about the wondrous nature of the physical world. With no affectation nor any attempt at intellectualizing, the poem uses a series of unexpected and unusual images to sing praise to the beauty and extraordinariness of a mundane but useful object.

"Ode to My Socks" ("Oda a los calcetines") appeared in the second volume of a series of four collections of odes written between 1954 and 1959. The majority of the almost 250 odes praise common things, including a lemon, an onion, salt, wine, the sea, clothes, a watch, and laziness, but there are odes too to personages, from poets to literary critics. These poems marked a significant turning point in Neruda's career as an artist, as he moved away from the high style and overt politicizing of his works written in the late 1930s and 1940s to a plainer form and interest in the particulars of everyday life. However, despite this artistic shift, the odes also show Neruda's continued commitment to the political ideals seen in his other works. A devoted communist, he sought all his life to write poetry for common folk, to speak for and to the dispossessed and reflect their concerns in his poetry. The odes, with their simple language and celebration of ordinary life, are indeed poetry for the people, a reconciliation of art and ideas with the concreteness life.

Ode to My Socks Summary

Title
The title alerts us to its purpose: it is a poem in praise of socks. The ode is a poem of celebration or exultation. Originally odes were elaborate and stately compositions sung in public in honor of a great personage, event, or season. The form dates back to ancient Greece. The poet Pindar, who lived in the fifth century B.C.E., composed poems of praise or glorification in highly structured, patterned stanzas. The odes of the Roman poet Horace who lived in the first century B.C.E used a simpler lyric form. European Renaissance odists Pierre de Ronsard and Andrew Marvell wrote in both Pindaric and Horatian form. The odes of nineteenth-century English poets such as John Keats and Percy Shelley tended to be freer in form and subject matter than the classical ode. However, the ode in general is primarily formal in style and about a serious subject. "Ode to My Socks," like all the poems in Neruda's books of odes, announces itself as a poem of celebration and praise, but the objects that are the subject of glorification, surprisingly, are common, everyday things. Few people would expect that a humble pair of socks would be candidates for exultation in a poem, but this is what the title announces to readers will be done.

Lines 1-16
The poet explains that he received as a gift from Maru Mori (who, although this is not mentioned in the poem, was the wife of the distinguished Chilean painter Camilo Mori) a... » Complete Ode to My Socks Summary