Ode to the West Wind is a poem by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Considered one of Shelley’s best works, the poem was composed in 1819, while the poet was living in Italy. It is representative of the Romantic period in English literature, with which Shelley is closely associated. The Romantics valued emotion, sensation, the beauty of nature, and the power of the imagination.
Loading the player...Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley’s famous poem was written in three poetic forms at once. First, it is an ode, or an elaborate lyric of praise and noble feeling. Second, it consists of five individual sonnets, or 14-line verses ending with a rhyming couplet. Finally, the sonnets are written in the Italian verse-form known as terza rima, in which the three-line stanzas have the rhyming pattern aba, bab, cbc, dcd. In terms of form alone, “Ode to the West Wind” is a remarkable display of poetic skill.
I O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, 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: O Thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, 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: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and Preserver, hear, O hear!
II 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: there are spread On the blue surface of thine aery surge, Like the bright hair uplifted from the head Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge Of the horizon to the zenith’s height, The locks of the approaching storm. Thou Dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!
III Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean, know Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!
IV 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! If even I were as in my boyhood, and could be The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven, As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed Scarce seemed a vision; 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 heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V 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. Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawakened Earth The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
“Ode to the West Wind” develops tremendous forward momentum, like that of the wind in the poem. Shelley creates this velocity by the frequent use of enjambment, the flowing of sentences from line to line without pause or punctuation. The terza rima also helps achieve this momentum, as each stanza’s middle line sets up the rhyme for the next.
For Shelley, the object of anticipation is not just spring but a popular uprising. The revolution of seasons in his ode is a metaphor for the inevitability of political revolution. The West Wind itself, “Destroyer and Preserver,” is the political force that destroys the old to build anew. Shelley wrote his poem shortly after learning of the Peterloo Massacre on Aug. 16, 1819, in which British soldiers killed 11 unarmed citizens at a peaceful rally. To his mind, this terrible event was a sign of tyranny so obvious and terrible that the ruling powers could not survive long.
During the same period, Shelley wrote poems that were more openly about political protest, and therefore could not be printed. “Ode to the West Wind,” like some of Shelley’s more daringly outspoken poems, presents current darkness as a sign of coming light. But because the poem uses an allegory—that is, a story with symbolic meaning—that seems harmless, it was not only printed but praised by conservative reviewers.
Shelley lived barely three more years after composing his great poem. He drowned in a small sailboat in northern Italy during a violent summer storm. He was only 30 years old.
For more information on Shelley, see Shelley, Percy Bysshe. See also English literature (Romantic poetry); Poetry (Lyric poetry) (Forms) (Romantic poetry).
