Ode to the West Wind

Sibaprasad Dutta

Summary

Shelley 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.

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?"

Form

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 of 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.

Commentary

The wispy, fluid terza rima of "Ode to the West Wind" finds Shelley taking a long
thematic leap beyond the scope of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and incorporating his
own art into his meditation on beauty and the natural world. Shelley invokes the wind
magically, describing its power and its role as both "destroyer and preserver," and asks
the wind to sweep him out of his torpor "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!" In the fifth section,
the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into a metaphor for his
own art, the expressive capacity that drives "dead thoughts" like "withered leaves" over
the universe, to "quicken a new birth"--that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here
the spring season is a metaphor for a "spring" of human consciousness, imagination,
liberty, or morality--all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the
human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes
it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical
instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees. The thematic implication is
significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of
truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as a
source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature
with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about
the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.

The poem “Ode to the West Wind” directly conforms to Shelley’s poetic creed. Poetry,
Shelley writes in “A Defence of Poetry,” “…awakens and enlarges the mind by
rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combination of thought.
Poetry lifts its veil from the hidden beauty of the world.” Consistent with this theory of
poetic creation, Shelley’s Romanticism is filled with “vehement feelings, ecstatic,
mournful, passionate, desperate or fiercely indignant”. Sometimes he makes a sudden
turn of the theme and talks about himself just like the movements in Beethoven’s
symphonies. It is in this that he is unique among the Romantics—looking for a better
world of liberty, equality and fraternity in his idealistic project of life. For this, he is seen
to be pessimistic about the present but highly optimistic about the future to come.

The Romantic poets made frequent use of the wind as a soothing symbol. But in
Shelley’s treatment it is not a “correspondent breeze”; it is rather ferocious in its energy.
M.H. Abrams says “because of the ferocity the wind becomes a vast impersonal force,
which the poet needs as a symbol of both destruction and creation”. Herein lies the
importance of the wind as the metaphor for revolutionary social change.

In the very first stanza West Wind appears with an accumulated force–a “breath of
autumn’s being”—to blow away the dead leaves. Shelley compares the West Wind to a
magician because, just as a powerful magician drives away ghosts, the wind performs
the same kind of operation by sweeping away the dead things in autumnal nature by
remaining itself invisible. The phrase “pestilence-stricken multitude” here, on the
surface level, refers to the leaves, which are decomposing on the ground. But
symbolically the ‘multitudes’ refers to the entire human society, which, the poet thinks,
in a state of degeneration.
“…O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
 The wing’d seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave.”

The West Wind carries the seeds with wing-like devices down to the ground where
those remain dormant. During spring, however, when Zephyr, the warm and gentle
wind will blow across the land, the seeds, shooting forth from the ground, will grow
into plants. Here Shelley seems to have a very swift vision of the spring. He sees that just
as with the onset of spring shepherds go out with their flocks of sheep for tending on the
green field, the gentle breeze similarly causes the buds to bloom and carry the fragrances
from one place to another. The West Wind moves with a terrific force and makes a
massacre of all that stand in its way. But it takes care to preserve the seeds under the soil
so as to ensure a resurrection in the world of nature with the advent of the spring. In this
way, the West Wind becomes both a “destroyer and preserver.”

In the second stanza the wind changes its field of operation; it is set in the air, in the
“steep sky”. The West Wind, while operating in the sky, moves along with all its might,
just as the stream of a river. In so doing it forces the accumulated clouds—right from
the surface of the ocean up to the sky—to disintegrate. The Wind performs this kind of
function by forcing the clouds too—just as it causes the leaves of the trees to fall off.
Shelley here may be referring to the scientific fact that clouds are created in the sky out
of the evaporation of water from the surface of the water bodies on earth. But in the
immediate context of the poem, he must have observed the clouds accumulated right
from the surface of the ocean up to the great heights of the sky. That is why he imagines
the clouds as the inter-connected boughs of the ocean and the sky. Shelley compares the
clouds ravaged by the power of the wind to the uplifted hair of a Maenad in order to
convey the sense that the West Wind operates possessed by some supernatural force.

In the European seasonal cycle, autumn is the season which stands just before winter, at
the end of which a year closes. So before the coming of winter West Wind passes over
earth destroying the old degenerate things and making horrible sounds. The howling of
the wind is, therefore, imagined by the poet to be the dirge or the funeral song for the
closing year. Shelley here addresses the clouds, accumulated from the surface of the
ocean up to the great heights of the sky, as “angels of rain and lightning” because they
obviously indicate that rain and lightning are approaching soon.

By the expression “the dome of a vast sepulchre” Shelley here refers to the closing night
which will serve as the dome of a vast tomb, in which the closing year will be buried.
The accumulated water vapors also make the roof over the dying year and the
atmosphere seems to be solid because of thick layers of dense clouds. The point is that
Wind operates with the same and single point agenda: it destroys the dead and
preserves the living.
In the third stanza the realm of the ruling West Wind is the sea, both the Mediterranean
and the Atlantic, and both the surface and the vegetation beneath. Shelley here has
personified the Mediterranean, which perhaps in its sleep is dreaming of the destruction
of the palaces. During summer the Mediterranean and the Roman palaces and, the
towers which remain submerged, are all quiet as if they seem to be sleeping because no
storms appear to ruffle the surface of the sea in that season. But the wind agitates the
sea, and the palaces (shadows) seem to quiver on account of the tremendous motion of
the waves. This may be easily taken for allusions to Shelley’s hope for political change in
Italy, for the collapse of the kings and kingdoms. Shelley here must have tried to bring
home a political philosophy. The old palaces and towers symbolize corrupt, degenerate
and old power, old order and institutions. All these should be destroyed, the poet
dreams along with the sea, in order to make way for a new beginning.

As the scene shifts to the Atlantic, “the somnolent summer yields to the ruthless
autumn.” The reader is taken not only to the Atlantic, where its smooth surface has
turned into deep waves, but under it, where woods and foliage are forced to dispossess
themselves of foliage upon hearing the Wind’s voice.

The fourth stanza begins, as pointed out by Michael Ferber somewhat the way
Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” begins, by briefly recapitulating the themes of the first
three movements. Now, the Wind is seen in the fourth stanza in relation to the poet
himself:
“If I were a dead leaf thou mightiest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee.”

As an idealist and as an extremely sensitive soul, Shelley was in much distress to see
mankind exploited and being dehumanized by the corrupt, degenerate and old political
powers and institutions. He wanted to see mankind reach an ideal state of life based on
fraternity, equality and democracy. And that is why he was seeking revolution, which
he refers to as his “sore need.” Shelley erupts in Romantic agony,

“Oh! Lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

The poet wants to preach the words of revolution to mankind. But he knows that lacks
the energy to do so. In order to acquire the strength and speed of the West Wind, he
wants to be a piece of cloud, a leaf and a wave. The poet now remembers that in his
boyhood he was full of energy and vigour, and as such that he would not refrain himself
from competing with the cloudlets borne away in the sky by the wind. But now he lacks
the energy to do so and that is why he seeks to be invaded by the fierce wind so that he
may be supplied with energy and inspiration. Again, Shelley here thinks of himself as
having accumulated the degenerate habits and ideas. In order to be refreshed and
reinvigorated, the poet invites or rather prays to the Wind to invade his self. He wants
this also with the intention of acquiring some of the fierce energy of the wind in this
process. The West Wind comes into being during autumn with its predestined function
of destroying the old and degenerate, thereby paving the way for the new. As it is
destructive, its processes are bound to have certain sad implications. But destruction is
also a necessary prelude to a new awakening, which implies sweetness.

He longs to be invaded by the fierce spirit of the Wind and to become,

“…through my lips to unawaken’d earth

At last he is optimistic about the future and closes the poem with a prophecy:
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

It becomes clear that the poet invokes the example of the operations of the west wind in
nature because, in turn, he wants to spread his message of resurrection through this
poem and other poems he plans to compose. In other words, an evidence of a natural
phenomenon in nature turns out to be a poetic inspiration for him.

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