Ode to the West Wind | PB Shelley | Ode to the west wind by PB Shelley | ode to the west wind summary

Ode to the west wind by pb Shelley /ode to the west wind summary -

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote "Ode to the West Wind" in 1819 while living in Florence, Italy. To be exact, when he published the poem with his unperformable play Prometheus Unbound in 1820, he claimed in a footnote to have written "Ode to the West Wind" while sitting in the woods near the Arno River on a windy day in October. Lucky man, we say, but although he loved Italy, he was feeling depressed about beine detached from the political and social scene back in his native Englana As a political, religious and literary radical, Shelley was heavily invested in his own ability to influence society. Some poets need solitude and privacy and a retreat in the woods to do their best work, but Shelley needed stimulating arguments and social action. "Ode to the West Wind is one of the poems in which he considers the role and power of the poet or philosopher to spread new ideas and effect change. It's also one of Shelley's more accessible poems.

 Its brevity, smooth tone and straightforward use of natural imagery present his abstract ideas about philosophy and poetry in a compact way. Think of it as Shelley's own summary of himself - or at least one aspect of himself. Analysis 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", añd 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 second section of the poem deals with the sky. Like withered leaves, the loose clouds fall from the unseen forests of the heaven into the river of the west wind. Suddenly, the imagery of the leaves is replaced by the human imagery. The clouds become hair of a huge giant. The west wind then becomes transformed into a mournful tune.

 And the rapidly encroaching night becomes the dome of an extensive sepulchre, canopied by the unifying power of the west wind. The third section presents the effects of the wind on the sea. Here the placid Mediterranean is personified-asleep, dreaming of old palaces and towers which are only reflections. The west wind drives away unreal thoughts of the Mediterranean Sea. The under-water vegetation feels the arrival of the wind the sheds the leaves. TThe 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 v ere, 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", i.e. to be his own spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, "like withered

The Romantic Poets 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?" This makes the poem full of optimism and new hopes. The last section of the presents the details of this identification sought to be established between the poet and the west wind. He desires to become the mouth piece of the west wind, as the forest is the lyre on which it plays the rustling tune. He asks the west wind to drive his old dead ideas which will form the manure to help the blossoming forth of new conceptions. The poet wants that the prophetic note of the west wind should spread throughout the worlds though his mouth. The optimistic prophecy, 'If Winter come, can Spring be far behind? makes the poem full of optimism and new hopes. In short, 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, 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. 16 Stanza 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 the scheme aba, beb, edc, ded, ee.