Ode to the West Wind Flashcards
1
Q
Context
A
“Ode to the West Wind” is a poem written by the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. According to Shelley, the poem was written in the woods outside Florence, Italy in the autumn of 1819. In the poem, the speaker directly addresses the west wind. The speaker treats the west wind as a force of death and decay, and welcomes this death and decay because it means that rejuvenation and rebirth will come soon. In the final two sections of the poem, the speaker suggests that he wants to help promote this rebirth through his own poetry—and that rejuvenation he hopes to see is both political and poetic: a rebirth of society and its ways of writing.
2
Q
Death and re-birth
A
- Throughout “Ode to the West Wind,” the speaker describes the West Wind as a powerful and destructive force: it drives away the summer and brings instead winter storms, chaos, and even death. Yet the speaker celebrates the West Wind and welcomes the destruction that it causes because it leads to renewal and rebirth.
- The West Wind is not peaceful or pleasant. It is, the speaker notes, “the breath of Autumn’s being.” Autumn is a transitional season, when summer’s abundance begins to fade. So too, everywhere the speaker looks the West Wind drives away peace and abundance. The West Wind strips the leaves from the trees, whips up the sky, and causes huge storms on the ocean. And, in the first section of the poem, the speaker compares the dead leaves the West Wind blows to “ghosts” and “pestilence-stricken multitudes.” The West Wind turns the fall colors into something scary, associated with sickness and death.
- Yet despite the destructive power of the West Wind the speaker celebrates it—because such destruction is necessary for rebirth. As the speaker notes at the end of the poem’s first section, the West Wind is both a “destroyer” and “preserver.” These are the traditional names of two Hindu gods, Shiva and Vishnu. Vishnu’s role is to preserve the world; Shiva is supposed to destroy it. The West Wind combines these two opposite figures. As the speaker announces in the final lines—”O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”—the West Wind is able to merge these opposites because death is required for life, and winter for Spring. In order to have the beautiful renewal and rebirth that Spring promises, one needs the powerful, destructive force of the West Wind.
3
Q
Poetry and re-birth
A
- Throughout “Ode to the West Wind,” the speaker praises and celebrates the West Wind’s power—it is destructive, chaotic—and yet such destruction is necessary for rebirth and renewal. Indeed, the speaker so admires the wind that he wants to take, adopt, or absorb the West Wind’s power’s into his poetry.
- The speaker describes himself as a diminished person: he is “chained and bowed.” Far from condemning the destructive power of the wind, the speaker hopes the West Wind will revive him. At different points in the poem, the speaker has different ideas about what this might look like. Most simply, the wind simply becomes the speaker, or becomes part of him. “Be thou me,” the speaker tells the wind.
- But the speaker also proposes more complicated interactions between himself and the wind. At one point, he asks the Wind, to “make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.” In other words he wants to be a musical instrument, specifically the lyre, the musical instrument that poets traditionally play while they perform their poems. In this scheme, the speaker helps the wind—he’s like a musical accompaniment to it. The speaker doesn’t take an active role, the wind does. (These roles are reinforced later when the speaker imagines the Wind “driv[ing] my dead thoughts over the universe”—it certainly seems that the Wind is doing the real work).
4
Q
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being
A
- The first line of “Ode to the West Wind” hints at the poem’s themes and begins to establish its form. The speaker begins his poem by talking directly to the “West Wind.” This is an instance of apostrophe: though the speaker addresses the wind, the wind’s not exactly human—and perhaps not even capable of understanding what the speaker’s saying, let alone responding to him.
- This will be a major problem in the poem. As the poem progresses, the speaker will repeat this gesture, addressing the “West Wind,” calling it “Thou,” over and over (an instance of the poetic device anaphora). As the speaker does so, he begins to question—more and more insistently—whether apostrophe really works, whether it’s actually possible to communicate with the natural world. This is an urgent question for the speaker: he not only admires and celebrates the West Wind, he also wants to share in its power.
- In the poem’s first line, the speaker says a couple of interesting things about the West Wind, things that anticipate the poem’s broader themes. First, he calls it “wild.” The West Wind seems out of control—or, at least, out of human control. It is undomesticated, untamed. The alliteration between “wild” and “West Wind” locks in this connection: it makes it seem like wildness is essential to the West Wind’s character.
5
Q
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning:
A
- In the second section of the poem, the speaker continues to describe the Wind. However, the speaker switches things up here. In the first section, he focuses on the effect that the wind has on leaves and plants; in this section he focuses on the sky.
- In lines 15-17, the speaker describes the clouds that the wind whips across the sky. Recalling the simile the speaker introduced in lines 2-3, he describes the clouds as being like “decaying leaves.” This simile again alludes to a famous passage from Dante, where Dante compares the souls of the dead to fallen leaves. Here, the clouds seem ghostly, spectral, like dead spirits. This simile and allusion thus bundles three images into one: clouds, leaves, and ghosts.
- The speaker extends this simile into line 17. If the clouds are like dead leaves, they fell from the “boughs”—that is, the branches—of “Heaven and Ocean.” In other words, the earth and the sky are like trees and the clouds are the leaves shaken loose from those trees.
- The simile is complex, multilayered, and the speaker makes it even more complicated in line 18, where he adds in a metaphor: the clouds are like “angels” full of “rain and lightning.” This is the most explicitly Christian reference in the poem, since angels are an important part of Christianity. But the speaker makes the angels seem strange, less Christian, by filling them up with rain and lightning. Further, the metaphor helps clarify what kind of clouds the speaker is describing. They’re not whispy horsetails, but big, threatening storm clouds.
- This wild energy also manifests in the way the poem uses end-stops. For instance, line 25 is technically an end-stopped line. In the somewhat strained grammar of the poem, line 25 counts as the completion of a grammatical unit. The sentence could end here. But it doesn’t: instead, the speaker extends the sentence and the metaphor. So, this line could be interpreted as either an end-stop or an enjambment—or even, paradoxically, both. In this way, the poem mimics the West Wind’s energy, rushing past the boundaries and borders within the poem itself.
In these lines, the poem’s form re-commences: after the terza rima of the first section ends, the second section starts it up again - ends the same way, terza rima wraps up with a final rhyming couplet.
6
Q
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes:
A
- The speaker begins by describing the wind as an “unseen presence.” In other words, it’s invisible. But it still has a big effect on the world: it drives the “dead” leaves. This might be a beautiful, soothing sight: colorful, fallen leaves whirling in the breeze. But for the speaker, it’s spooky and unsettling. He compares the leaves to “ghosts […] fleeing” from “an enchanter.” The simile makes the leaves into supernatural, scary spirits—and the wind becomes a powerful, magical figure, closely associated with the dead.
- This simile is also an allusion to Dante’s Inferno. In Canto III of the Inferno, as the speaker of Dante’s poem enters Hell, he compares the dead souls waiting to be carried into Hell to dead leaves. Of course, Shelley’s poem also uses Dante’s signature form, terza rima. The poem is thus playing with Dante’s legacy. This signals that the poem is intensely ambitious—The Divine Comedy (a three-book poem, of which the Inferno is the first book) is one of the most expansive and accomplished poems ever written.
- But Shelley’s poem doesn’t just recapitulate Dante’s triumph. It also changes some of Dante’s ideas. Where Dante’s world is organized and ruled by God, Shelley—who was famously an atheist—resists bringing God into things. His world is ruled by natural cycles of birth and decay, rather than by some divine presence.
7
Q
until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
…
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
A
- In contrast to the West Wind, with its destructive force, the Spring wind is soothing and nurturing. Once it blows its trumpet, or “clarion,” the seeds lying in the ground will wake up and fill the plains and hills with “living hues and odours.” In other words, the Spring wind helps the flowers bud and blossom. It does so with care and concern: in line 11, the speaker describes the buds and flowers as the Spring wind’s sheep, or “flocks.” The “flocks” serve as a symbol for purity and innocence; the simile suggests that the Wind works with the gentle, careful stewardship of a shepherd guiding a flock to the field.
- Because the seeds are like “corpse[s],” their rebirth in the Spring seems almost like a resurrection—the dead coming back to life. In another poem, this might be a Christian allusion, but Shelley once again refuses to make a connection to Christianity. He plays with Christian symbols and traditions, but in his world, such moments of resurrection are entirely natural—they don’t require God’s intervention.
- In line 14, however, the speaker notes that the Wind’s power is ambiguous, even contradictory. He describes it as “destroyer and preserver.” This description alludes to the traditional names of two Hindu gods, Shiva and Vishnu. Vishnu is traditionally tasked with preserving the world; Shiva with destroying it. The West Wind combines these two contradictory tasks, binding together two gods who are usually understood to be at odds with each other. It takes a while for the speaker to fully explain why and how the West Wind manages to combine these two contradictory functions. But the poem has already hinted at the eventual solution: the destruction that the West Wind brings is necessary to preserve the world.
8
Q
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable!
A
- The speaker spends the first three sections of “Ode to the West Wind” describing the wind’s violent, chaotic effects on land, sea, and sky. In the fourth section, he suddenly changes focus and starts talking about himself. And he says a series of surprising things about himself. Even though he’s spent the last 40-odd lines describing how destructive the wind is, the speaker wants to “share / the impulse of thy strength.” He doesn’t want to run away from the West Wind: he wants to have some of its power. He wants to be one of the things that the West Wind stirs up: to be borne by it like a “dead leaf,” to be driven by it like “swift cloud,” to be driven by it like “a wave.”
- Although the form of the poem is unchanged in this fourth section, some of the poetic devices the speaker has used throughout the poem change their function as the poem’s subject changes. For instance, take a look at the alliteration in line 45: “pant” and “power.” The /p/ sound in the line underlines the relationship between the wind and the speaker: it pushes him to the limits of his abilities and causes him to “pant.” In previous sections—recall the alliterations in the poem’s first line—the speaker used alliteration to characterize the West Wind. Here it characterizes the speaker himself, his desires. This a good lesson for thinking more broadly about the poem’s devices: they often mean different things in different places, shifting as the poem’s priorities shift.
8
Q
Seeds
A
- In lines 6-7, the speaker describes how the West Wind carries “winged seeds” to their “dark wintry bed.” In other words, the wind knocks loose seeds from the plants holding them, and carries the seeds to the ground, where they lie all winter. This is something that really happens in the fall—and the speaker is, partially, describing literal seeds involved in an actual natural process.
- But the seeds also play a symbolic role in the poem. They symbolize the possibility of rebirth and renewal. As the speaker notes in the next few lines, as soon as spring comes, the seeds sprout, producing “sweet buds” and “living hues and odours.” If the seeds are like “corpse[s]” in their “grave[s],” then their rebirth in the Spring is something like resurrection. (Shelley was, famously, an atheist, and so this image of resurrection is notably secular: instead of involving God, he portrays it as an entirely natural process). For all its destructive power, the West Wind plays an important role in bringing about that rebirth and renewal: without it, the seeds would never get to the ground and start growing. In this way, the West Wind earns the title the speaker gives it later in the poem: it is both a “destroyer” and a “preserver.”
9
Q
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,
A
- In the third, he turns to the ocean, describing how the wind stirs enormous waves. The poem thus surveys the whole world, all of its environments—and shows how, wherever one turns, the West Wind causes destruction and chaos.
- The speaker begins the third section in the same way he began the last two: addressing the West Wind directly, calling it “Thou.” Beginning the section in this way—returning to the anaphora that has stretched through the poem so far—the speaker reminds the reader that he is talking to the Wind: he’s using apostrophe. After addressing the Wind, though, the speaker abruptly shifts focus. Instead of talking about the wind, he talks about the “blue Mediterranean”—the balmy, calmer sea that separates Africa and Europe.
- The speaker personifies the Mediterranean, describing it as asleep, full of “summer dreams” next to a volcanic island in the bay of Baiae (an actual bay near Naples, Italy). As the speaker describes the Mediterranean, it’s curled up in its currents, “coil[ed]” in “his crystalline streams.” The consonant /l/ sound that runs through lines 30-31—for, example, in “lay,” “lull’d,” “coil,” and “crystalline”—is calm and lulling; it mimics the sleepy feel of the Mediterranean. Predictably, the West Wind, the force of chaos and violence, doesn’t let the Mediterranean continue to sleep. Rather, the wind wakes it up.
9
Q
Flock
A
- In line 11, the speaker describes the Spring wind “driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air.” In other words, the wind is like a shepherd; it helps bring out the buds of flowers in the same way a shepherd drives their sheep, their “flocks,” to pasture.
- This simile is already pretty complicated, and it’s made even more so by the symbol in the middle of it, the “flocks.” “Flocks” of sheep are a traditional symbol in poetry for innocence and beauty. In pastoral poetry—a whole genre of poetry dedicated to talking about shepherds and sheep—the presence of the “flock” often suggests that the shepherd is free from politics and all the dirt and complication of life in the city. In this sense, the “flocks” suggest an important contrast with the speaker’s characterization of the West Wind, which is so closely associated with death, violence, and chaos. As a symbol, the “flocks” suggest a world where such negative things are of no concern, because it is so pure, innocent, and beautiful.
10
Q
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness.
A
- In the fifth section of “Ode to the West Wind,” the speaker continues to directly address the West Wind, asking it for help. In the previous section, he has described himself as a constrained and diminished person, “chain’d and bow’d.” He hopes the West Wind will help him recover some of his lost freedom and possibility. In the fifth section, he proposes two—very different—ways that the West Wind might help him. In lines 57-61, he advances one possibility. He wants the West Wind to make him “thy lyre.” A lyre is a small, hand-held harp: in ancient Greece, poets strummed the instrument as they performed, using it to provide musical accompaniment for their poems. The lyre is thus often symbolic of poetry itself. It symbolizes poetry in this poem too—but in a strange way. The speaker doesn’t want to play the lyre. He wants to be the lyre. In other words, the wind is the real poet here, and the speaker wants simply to accompany and support it.
10
Q
I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A
- In lines 47-51, the speaker imagines being a boy, running with the West Wind as its “comrade.” In lines 51-2, the speaker describes how his life would be different if he still felt that sense of freedom and possibility: he would never have “striven / as thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.” In other words, he wouldn’t have asked the West Wind for its help. The word “prayer” is interesting: it recalls other moments where the poem makes reference to religion. If this is a “prayer,” though, it’s a blasphemous one: the speaker isn’t asking God for help, but rather the West Wind, a natural force. Once again, the speaker flirts with religion, only to refuse it, or to reveal a closer connection with nature than with the Christian or any other god
- Indeed, he now says that though he was once “one too like thee”—a person free and untamed, like the wind—he is no longer. He has been “chain’d and bow’d”: time and the various limits of human life have diminished and constrained him. The speaker appeals to the wind to help him restore some of his own lost freedom and possibility. Note, though, that as the speaker makes this plea, he abandons the poem’s refrain. At the end of each of the poem’s previous three sections, the speaker had commanded: “O hear!” The speaker seems more daring here, willing to bet that the wind will listen to him, even if he doesn’t check in regularly.
11
Q
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
A
As “Ode to the West Wind” comes to a close, it returns to its central theme, its core argument: that the West Wind’s destructive power is actually necessary, and even healthy. The speaker makes clear that the destruction brought about by the West Wind helps bring about renewal and rebirth—in fact, the speaker goes further and suggests that such renewal is impossible without the West Wind. In previous sections of the poem, the speaker has treated this as a natural cycle: Spring follows Winter—and, in a sense, requires it. In lines 65-70, the speaker returns to these natural cycles, asking “O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” However, in these lines the speaker suggests that this natural cycle is also a metaphor for a different kind of rebirth and renewal—a political renewal, perhaps.
12
Q
Old Palaces and towers
A
- In line 33, the speaker describes the “blue Mediterranean” asleep, dreaming of “old palaces and towers.” The speaker is careful to place this dream vision in a specific place, the Bay of Baiae near Naples, in Italy. And so the speaker may have specific buildings in Naples in mind, buildings he wants the reader to see in their mind.
- But the “old palaces and towers” also take on a symbolic significance in the line. They symbolize the past itself—history—the glorious accomplishment of previous generations. The personified “Blue Mediterranean” looks at these symbols of the past with comfort and complacency: he doesn’t feel any need to challenge or change them. It seems likely, though, that the West Wind might feel differently. (Indeed, the speaker brings the “blue Mediterranean” into the poem in order to draw a contrast between it and the violence and energy of the West Wind). The symbol thus gives the reader a quiet, implicit hint: part of what the speaker hopes the West Wind will destroy is the past, in order to make space for a new society to emerge.
13
Q
Thorns of life
A
When the speaker complains about falling on the “thorns of life” in line 54, he isn’t talking about literal thorns. Instead, the thorns are symbols—symbols for the difficulties that one faces in life: perhaps pain, disappointment, or aging. The speaker doesn’t specify what, exactly, he’s struggling with—what precise forces or feelings have limited his capacities and creative powers. What matters, instead, is simply that the speaker does feel limited and diminished, like he has lost something important about himself—something the West Wind would help him regain. The “thorns of life” are thus a very vague, general symbol: they stand for the difficulties that the speaker faces in general, without embodying a particular or specific problem or disappointment.
14
Q
Blood
A
In line 54, the speaker uses the “thorns of life” as a symbol for the troubles and difficulties that he faces in his life—without specifying what, exactly, he’s struggling with. He ends the same line with another symbol: “I bleed,” he exclaims. Here, the blood that the speaker bleeds serves as a symbol for his disappointment and diminishment. He feels like he has lost something essential, important—he is less powerful and creative than he once was. The blood symbolizes this lost power, this lost aspect of his own personality.
15
Q
Lyre
A
- In line 57, the speaker expresses a strange desire: he wants the West Wind to “make [him its] lyre.” A lyre is a small hand-held harp. In ancient Greece, poets would play the lyre as they performed their poems. As a result the lyre often serves as a symbol for poetry itself. It does that here: it symbolizes poetry.
- But the way the symbol is used in the poem suggests that the speaker has an unusual relationship with poetry. The speaker doesn’t want to play the lyre, he wants to be the lyre, the instrument that the poet plays—in which case, the West Wind itself would be the poet. In other words, the poet is not asking the wind for inspiration or for it to make him into a poet. He wants to be in a more subservient position—he wants to accompany the wind, to help make the wind’s poem sound sweeter.
16
Q
Ashes and sparks
A
In lines 66-7, the speaker asks the West Wind to scatter his “words” like “ashes and sparks…among mankind.” The “ashes and sparks” are symbolic—the speaker doesn’t want to start a literal fire. Instead, he wants his words to serve as inspiration and encouragement, which will help people break free from the oppression they currently endure. (The speaker never explicitly says what he wants to see change—but it seems to be something political). The “ashes and sparks” are thus symbols for the beginning of change, the start of a revolution, the opening of something radically new.
17
Q
Spring
A
- Throughout the poem, the West Wind has been a force of destruction and death. But the speaker has celebrated its power. In the last line, it becomes clear why. The speaker wants renewal and rebirth, a transformation of society. And the wind helps to bring about that rebirth, by sweeping away everything that has grown tired, old, and oppressive. In this sense, it is like “Winter.” And the renewal that it promises to help bring about is like “Spring.”
- Spring, in the last line of the poem (and also in line 9), is thus a symbol for renewal and rebirth—the emergence of something radically new. This symbol is at the heart of the poem, the thing it wants to see happen. The poem is an “Ode” to the West Wind because the West Wind, with all its destructive force, is necessary to make this symbol real.
18
Q
Form
A
- As its title announces, “Ode to the West Wind” is an ode, a form that has existed in Western culture since the Greeks. As the ode has moved across languages, cultures, and poetic traditions, it hasn’t used a single meter or rhyme scheme. Instead, poets write odes in the forms that make the most sense to them. Shelley wrote his ode in terza rima, a form that the Italian poet Dante made famous in his depiction of Hell in the Inferno.
- Furthermore, Shelley arranges his terza rima sections as sonnets, a form made popular in English by poets like William Shakespeare and Thomas Wyatt. To put that more bluntly: each section of the poem is its own sonnet. Yet the sonnets in Shelley’s poem are slightly unusual, since they don’t follow the rhyme scheme for either a Shakespearean or a Petrarchan sonnet, two of the most popular types of sonnets.
- However, even though this poem’s sonnets are a little weird, they quietly acknowledge the history and importance of the sonnet in English poetry. “Ode to the West Wind” is a kind of miniature sonnet sequence, like Edmund Spencer’s Amoretti or Sir Phillip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. These older poets used sonnets to depict speakers who were tangled in hopeless love affairs. Shelley updates this tradition by depicting a speaker professing profound admiration for an element of nature—the west wind.
19
Q
Meter
A
- Such metrical details can become overwhelming; the lines are so irregular that it gets hard to fully describe all their metrical variations. The good news is that these individual variations aren’t as important as their general effect. What really matters is that the poem starts in a kind of chaotic state. Usually poets like to establish a meter first and then introduce variations on it. Not Shelley: the first metrically regular line of the poem is the poem’s 7th line! In other words, it takes the poem a full six lines before it finds its rhythm. And even after that it often diverges into irregularities.
- The poem does this purposefully: the speaker is imitating the west wind itself. The speaker wants to take on the violent energy of the wind, the way it rushes through the world, sowing chaos. The poem’s unsteady meter reflects the wind’s energy and violence—and tries to make that energy and violence part of the poem.
20
Q
Rhyme scheme
A
Terza rima is originally an Italian form. It was developed during the Middle Ages and popularized by the poet Dante, in his epic poem The Divine Comedy, which follows the poet on a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. For many readers, any poem written in terza rima instantly calls Dante to mind. It’s thus associated with some of the most powerful and ambitious poetry ever written. The poem’s rhyme scheme suggests that the speaker intends this poem to be ambitious and deadly serious—that he is taking the reader on a journey as equally epic as The Divine Comedy.
21
Q
Speaker
A
- The speaker of “Ode to the West Wind” is anonymous. However, the reader does learn some important and helpful information about the speaker late in the poem. The speaker is not a child anymore, and is man, since in line 48 he refers to his “boyhood” as being over. He looks back on childhood mournfully: he feels like he’s lost his freedom and strength as he’s grown up. In the poem’s fourth section, he notes that as a child he was “the comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven”—meaning that he was able to explore and wander with the west wind as it raced across the sky.
- Further, the speaker is a poet. In line 65, the speaker asks the wind to “scatter” his “verse” across “mankind.” He is interested in the west wind because of the way that it promises to expand and empower his creativity. The speaker further seems to have frustrations with the world in which he lives: he wants to send his ideas and words out into the world with the hope that they will spark change and renewal. Though the speaker doesn’t ever tell the reader what he’s frustrated with, many readers have assumed that his frustrations are political in nature: the speaker wants his poem to help create a new, and better society.
22
Q
Setting
A
- According to Shelley’s own note on the poem, “Ode to the West Wind” was composed in the woods near Florence, Italy in 1819: “This poem was…written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains …” The poem is thus linked—for its poet, at least—to a specific time and place.
- But—surprisingly—the poem doesn’t really refer to that time and place: there are no specific references to Florence or the Arno river that runs through it (though the speaker does eventually refer to “Baiae’s bay,” a bay near Naples in the south of Italy). And the poem doesn’t describe a particular gust of wind. Instead, the poem soars across the world, describing the west wind’s effects on the earth, the sea, and the skies. Because the poem is about the west wind in general (and not some particular gust or storm) it has to transcend a specific setting and talk about how the west wind behaves generally. Thus, the poem’s setting encompasses the entire world.
23
Q
Literary context
A
- Percy Bysshe Shelley was an important poet in a movement known as Romanticism. Romanticism appeared at the end of the 18th century (around, say, 1780). It was a reaction to the intellectual and poetic trends that dominated in the 1700s. Prominent thinkers like Voltaire and Denis Diderot stressed the importance of reason, rationality, and science. Anything that wasn’t reasonable and scientific, they rejected—treating it as backward and primitive. These thinkers had a big effect on poetry. Poets worked to purify their poems of anything that might be irrational or out-of-control.
- For early Romantic poets, like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this emphasis on reason and rationality felt limiting—almost like a kind of repression. They sought to liberate the powers of the irrational, to write poetry that tapped into the deep, dark undercurrents of the human mind. Shelley, who wasn’t even born until Romanticism had gotten underway, followed their example. But he, along with his peers—poets like John Keats and Lord Byron—felt that poets like Wordsworth had betrayed the movement they started, becoming too conservative as they aged. He hoped to restore Romanticism to its earlier, more revolutionary possibilities.
- Shelley also often looked to the Greeks for philosophical and poetic inspiration. In “Ode to the West Wind,” he adapts the ancient Greek form of the ode. The ancient poet Pindar composed odes to celebrate the victories of athletes in the Olympic Games. In this tradition, odes usually praise powerful and important people, or even gods. Because of their association with powerful people, such odes tend to be politically conservative poems that praise society as it currently is, instead of calling for change.
- Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” follows many of the traditions of the ode: it is an ornate poem, full of elevated language and tricky poetic devices. And it praises the destructive power of the west wind, asking if the poet might share in that power. However, the west wind is, of course, different than a king or an Olympic athlete. The speaker praises a facet of the weather rather than something human.
24
Q
Historical context
A
- “Ode to the West Wind” was written in 1819. Its author, Percy Shelley, held a number of political beliefs that, at the time, were pretty radical: he was in favor, for instance, of abolishing slavery; he developed ideas about using non-violent protest to resist unjust power structures; and he advocated for the independence of Ireland from England—among many other positions.
- But 1819 was a difficult time to be a politically radical person. Whereas the French Revolution had been a symbol of democratic hope to a previous generation of poets, such as Wordsworth, by 1814 the King of France, Louis XVIII, had been reinstated. All the bloodshed and energy of the revolution had resulted in a return to monarchy—the very form of government the revolution had tried to get rid of.
- In England, society was becoming more and more conservative as the Victorian Era approached. In other words, for someone like Shelley, it probably felt like the world was moving backward in 1819, away from the direction he hoped it would eventually take. This sense of defeat is evident in “Ode to the West Wind,” reflected in the speaker’s feeling that only destruction of society as it is currently can pave the way for something new and better.
