P. B. Shelley: Ode to the West Wind: A Critical Reading

Dr. Arun Kr. Biswas

(For Semester IV Students and Paper CC IX)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) is a visionary romantic poet of English literature. Shelley wrote “Ode to the West Wind” in 1819 while living in Florence, Italy. It was published in 1820 in London as part of the collection Prometheus Unbound. Regarding the composition of the poem, he claimed that “the poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno River, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind whose temperature is at once wild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains….with a violent tempest of hail … lightening peculiar to the Cisapine regions.”

Shelley influenced by the democratic ideals of French Revolution is concerned with regeneration of himself poetically, spiritually and of the world politically. As a political, religious, and literary radical, Shelley was heavily invested in his own ability to influence society. Ode to the West Wind is one of the poems in which he considers the role and power of the poet or philosopher to spread new ideas and effect change. Hence the poet’s prophetic urge highly echoed in the poem.

The Ode is one of the greatest lyrical poems composed by Shelley. The ode is the most impressive and the most rapturous of Shelley’s poems. According to Prof. Oliver Elton, “The poem is the greatest of all those lyrics of Shelley which do not, in brief compass, convey a single and simple emotion” The poem highlights Shelley’s prophetic vision of making the golden millennium, an ideal world based on democratic ideals of justice, equality and brotherhood of French revolution.

The poem is divided into five sections. The first three sections describe the impact of the west wind on the earth, the sky and the sea respectively. In the last two stanzas, the poet becomes intensely passionate and attempts to identify himself completely with the mighty “tameless and swift” west wind, in order to bring about revolution on the sleeping earth.

Summary/ Discussion

The speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a “destroyer and preserver,” hear him. The speaker calls the wind the “dirge / Of the dying year,” and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him. The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean from “his summer dreams,” and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making the “sapless foliage” of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear him. The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, “the comrade” of the wind’s “wandering over heaven,” then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers. He pleads with the wind to lift him “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”—for though he is like the wind at heart, untamable and proud—he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the earth.

The speaker asks the wind to “make me thy lyre,” to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, “like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth.” He asks the wind, by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, to be the “trumpet of a prophecy.” Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes his words to have, the speaker asks: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” In other words, through his prayer to the mighty west wind he wants to realize his unfulfilled prophetic ideas and thus establishing a better and regenerate world free from evils and injustice. He is hopeful that if the wintry season of death, decay and degeneration must be usurped by the happiness, freedom and regeneration of spring season.

Form/ Structure

The poem has heist form of artistic perfection with a definite evolution of thought. There is no indistinctness and digression in the poem. Each stanza is marked by a poetic prayer. Structurally, each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” contains five stanzas—four three-line stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each part follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line rhyme scheme employed by Dante in his Divine Comedy. In the three-line terza rima stanza, the first and third lines rhyme, and the middle line does not; then the end sound of that middle line is employed as the rhyme for the first and third lines in the next stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of the last three-line stanza. Thus each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” follows this scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE. In fact, the poem falls into five equal verses of chain-rhyme or terza rima, (ABA interlocks with BCB, CDC with DED so on) a scheme of Shelley’s own making which well fits in with the passion and feeling of the poem.

Images

The poem abounds in images drawn from natural world. Here the images are in most cases similes and metaphors succeeding with wild rapidity. According to Fowler, “The verse sweeps along with the elemental rush of the wind it celebrates”. They are natural, scientific and mythical/ biblical. The images such as “the leaves dead are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”, “pestilence-stricken multitudes”, “dirge of dying year”, image of “destroyer and preserver” “the thorns of life”, “Spirit fierce” etc. enhances the stylistic beauty as well as suits to the thematic tune of the poem.