Ode to the West Wind- shelley

 

Ode to the West Wind

In “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley defies the remote, impersonal character of the unseen Power behind Nature and strives to establish a personal relationship with it. The poem manages to reconcile the poet’s terrific emotional intensity with the elegant, even stately formal pattern of the regular Horatian ode. Using iambic pentameter throughout, Shelley made each of the five stanzas into a sonnet with four terza-rima tercets and a closing couplet. The poetical effect is rather unlike that of the usual sonnet. Shelley’s interlocking rhymes sweep a reader along like gusts of wind, and the couplet pounds its message home with direct clarity and force. Nature and strives to establish a personal relationship with it.

The first canto makes grief-spawned allusions to the deaths of the poet’s son William. Shelley speaks of autumn leaves as “pestilence-stricken multitudes” that the great wind blows to their “dark wintry bed” (graves). He finds intermixed with those driven leaves; however, the “winged seeds” will soon be awakened from a death-like sleep by the West Wind’s “azure sister of the spring”. The poet’s persona calls out to praise the wildness of the West Wind and call it “Destroyer and preserver.”

Canto 2 begins with a continuation of the speaker’s sense of awe concerning the wind’s might; he hails the wind as the clouds’ creator—a “living stream” in the sky that moves the “trees” of heaven and ocean. In stanza 2, the poet delineates a vision of angels that flow with the wind and that, in his simile, are like the “bright hair” streaming “from the head of some fierce Maenad.”

In canto 3, the poet’s persona furthers the notion of things changing instantly from sweetness to darkness and cold through the action of his ever-driving West Wind. He asks readers to envision a Mediterranean Sea suddenly being awakened from deep summer sleep “Beneath a pumice isle in Baiae’s Bay,” a place “All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers/ So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!”

Canto 4 begins with the poet shifts into a more personal voice. Shelley praises, contrasts himself with, and longs like a leaf to be wafted by his beloved West Wind. The poet would choose to be a dead leaf blown about by the wind, or a flying cloud, or a wave on the sea being pushed to shore rather than stay in his present despairing condition. “if even/ I were as in my boyhood, and could be/ The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven.”

Shelley asks it to “lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud” because, as he exclaims in one of the most memorable phrases of the poem, “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” The speaker feels weighed down by time and life’s circumstances, and he suffers unmercifully. He cries out for the release that his reigning West Wind can provide.

The Canto 5 ends with the persona’s most passionate pleas, and then features his commands to the invisible mover and shaker of the world. He petitions the wind to be its lyre, asking that, if his own leaves are falling as that in Nature, the wind should use them to help create a melancholy tone befitting the autumn season. Then he asks the wind for the ultimate favour—to be one with it: “Be thou, Spirit fierce,/ My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” He compares his thoughts to those dead leaves the wind blows, asking that those thoughts, like leaves, be whirled through the world to “quicken a new birth”. Thus, the Shelley becomes the prophet of an apocalyptic revolution to redeem humankind from torpid experience.