ODE TO THE WEST WIND – P.B. SHELLEY

ODE TO THE WEST WIND – P.B. SHELLEY

·         It was composed in autumn of 1819. It was first published in the volume “Promethus Unbound and other poems” in 1820.

·         Ode to the West Wind is one of the finest lyrics in English poetry.

·         Shelley blends the nature with autobiography.

·         The poem was written in a wood near Arno.

·         The poet was inspired at Personal observation that the wind over the Mediterranean Sea.

·         A first person persona addresses the west wind in five stanzas.

·         In the first stanza, the wind blows the leaves of autumn.

·         In the second stanza, the wind blows the clouds in the sky.

·         In the third stanza, the wind blows across an island and the waves of the sea.

·         In the fourth stanza, the persona imagines being the leaf, cloud, or wave, sharing in the wind’s strength. He desires to be lifted up rather than caught low on “thorns of life”, for he sees himself as like the wind: “tameless, and swift, and proud.”

·         In the fifth stanza, he asks the wind to play upon him like a lyre; he wants to share the wind’s fierce spirit. In turn, he would have the power to spread his verse throughout the world, reawakening it.

·         By the final stanza, the speaker has come to terms with the wind’s power over him, and he requests inspiration and subjectivity.

·         Each stanza is fourteen lines in length, using the rhyming pattern of aba bcb cdc ded ee. This is called terza rima, the form used by Dante in his Divine Comedy.

·         Shelley draws a parallel between the seasonal cycles of the wind and that of his ever-changing spirit.

·         Thematically, this poem is about the inspiration Shelley draws from nature.

·         The “breath of autumn being” is Shelley’s atheistic version of the Christian Holy spirit.

·         Instead of relying on traditional religion, Shelley focuses his praise around the wind’s role in the various cycle in nature- death, regeneration, preservation and destruction.

·         The speaker begins by praising the wind, using anthropomorphic techniques (wintry bed, chariots, corpses, and clarions) to personalize the great natural spirit in hopes that it will somehow heed his plea.

·         The speaker is aware of his own mortality and the immortality of his subject. This drives him to beg that he too can be inspired (“make me thy lyre”) and carried (“be through my lips to anawakened earth”) through land and time.

·         The poet appeals the West wind to treat him as a Lyre.

·         The West wind treats forest as its lyre.