ODE FOR COMMONWEALTH DAY, THE, the ode appointed to be delivered publicly upon the 3rd of September, the anniversary, kept as Commonwealth Day (q.v.), of the seating of the first Senate and Assembly in 1660. The custom dates from the tenth of those anniversaries, when John Dryden (q.v.), whose Heroic Stanzas upon the death of the Protector had shown what his gravity could do, was commissioned to furnish the day an ode. He furnished thirty, across thirty years, and they are not all of equal felicity: the best of them argue — it was the nature of the man to make even praise a demonstration — and the weakest versify the year's news with the punctuality of a gazette. The matter of the ode has always been double, the year reviewed and the Frame praised, and the proportion between the two duties has varied with the odist and with the year. From 1683 the ode had also its musician, the young Henry Purcell (q.v.) setting it in that year and for long after; and the union of the two arts has remained the custom, though never quite the rule.
The commission has descended in an unbroken line of seven. Dryden held it from the institution to 1700; Simon Coryton, 1700-28; Marmaduke Frayne, 1728-63, whose later odes took their matter, and something of their stride, from the victories of the Great Atlantic War (q.v.); Edward Quantock, 1763-1801; Lucius Harmer, 1801-43, to whom fell the year of Ushant (q.v.) and, at the last, the years of the Severance (q.v.), when the ode was pared to a few grave stanzas and the music was let go; Augustine Orme (q.v.), 1843-92; and Alfred Standen, who has held the commission since 1893 and holds it in the present year. It has never yet been held by a woman.
Of all the odes of the succession, one has passed from ceremony into literature: the Threnody for the Reunion, delivered upon the 3rd of September 1843, within four weeks of the Instrument of Reunion (q.v.), with which Orme opened his fifty years' tenure and closed, so far as verse could close it, the nation's civil wound. It made the day's observance a mourning, and the mourning a reunion, and it is the one ode of the whole line that the Commonwealth knows without book (see ORME, AUGUSTINE). Standen's odes keep the observance with credit and without event, which is perhaps what the observance asks. The odes are printed at the state's charge upon the morning of the day, and the sheet is in the province towns by the week's end; the collected line fills nine volumes, of which the reader in search of the poetry may fairly be spared eight. For the rest, the institution must be judged as institutions are, by its best years rather than its ordinary ones. An ode a year for two centuries and a half is a discipline no poetry could be expected to survive with credit; this one has survived it with one great poem, perhaps a dozen that a good judge re-reads, and an unbroken habit — and the habit, in a civil institution, is not the least of the three. (H. M.)