Ode To The West Wind Is Short

University of Karbala
College of Education for Humanities
Department of English Language
British Romanticism
Ode to the West Wind by #Percy_Bysshe_Shelley.
Asst. Lect. Ahmed Shahmani

Summary
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?”
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 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.
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.

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University of Karbala

College of Education for Humanities

Department of English Language

Ode to the West Wind by #Percy_Bysshe_Shelley.

Asst. Lect. Ahmed Shahmani

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