Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shell

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, 

The speaker addresses the ferocious West Wind as though it were a person because he capitalised ‘West’ and ‘Wind’. He further humanises the wind by referring to it as ‘the breath’. Leave dead meaning leaves shed. 

A famous critic, Desmond King-Hele says that ‘ Shelley injects life into the dull, litter of dead leaves, flying in the wind by making them ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.’ So like a magician casting out ghosts or evil spirits, the West Wind sweeps away the dead leaves.

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 

These colourful dead leaves are not attractive in the way that we typically think of autumn leaves; rather, they are strange, gloomy, and almost ill in appearance (like "pestilence-stricken multitudes“, It means multiple people stricken with disease). The speaker makes a second appeal to the West Wind. This time, the West Wind is said to have carried seeds to their earthly graves, where they will remain until the spring wind arrives and brings them back to life. Like a charioteer driving bodies into graves, the wind buries seeds in the earth. Thine: yours; azure:unclouded blue sky. 

*”The winged seeds”: According to Desmond King-Hele: “the central theme of the first stanza is the balance of death and rebirth in vegetation.”

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, oh hear!

The regeneration and blossoming that occur during that season appear to be the result of the spring wind. All of the seeds bloom as a result of the "clarion" (a type of trumpet) it blows.

“Driving sweet...in air”: As per John Drinkwater, the picture is that of flocks of sheep “spreading across a whole landscape, being slowly driven up to their mountain pastures.” Desmond King-Hele notes: “The spring is seen driving the sap up the trees, forcing out millions of buds to feed on the carbon dioxide of the air.”

The West Wind is invoked twice more by the speaker, who refers to it as a "Wild Spirit" that is present everywhere at once.

The West Wind is the "Destroyer and Preserver" because it brings about the end of winter while also allowing for the rebirth of spring. Then, he ultimately proceeds to call it. He wants to simply listen to the poet.

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,

The wind spreads the clouds in the sky as dead leaves float in a stream.

John Holloway writes: “The storm clouds look like the gigantic tree, with the loose, flying lower clouds streaming from it like autumn leaves and the upper cirrus clouds looking like its branches”

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread 

On the blue surface of thine aëry 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.

The storm that the West Wind is coming is described by the speaker by a strange comparison. He compares thunderstorm to a mythical Greek figure. Thunderclouds, or the "locks of the approaching storm," are dispersed throughout the airy "blue surface" of the West Wind in a similar way to how a Maenad's wild hair would flow around in the air.

These violent clouds go vertically all the way through the sky,

from the horizon to the uppermost part. (*Maenad in pagan Greek mythology is a wild woman who accompanies Dionasis or Bacchus, a Greek god of wine !)

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: oh hear!

In order to convey the strength of the West Wind, the speaker creates an unusual metaphor. As a "dirge," or funeral song, the wind is said to be blowing to signal the end of the previous year. The storm's approaching night will resemble a tomb (sepulchre /sepalka/) with a gloomy dome made of thunderclouds, lightning, and rain. 

The poet concludes by pleading with the West Wind to "hear" him once more, yet we are still unsure of his specific request.

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,
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! 

The Mediterranean sea is lulled to sleep by the sound of streams flowing into it. The pronoun he signifies that the Mediterranean sea here is personified a male.

"beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay," It was a holiday spot for the ancient Romans. Shelly had also visited the place and seen the ruins of the old villas built by the Romans. During his summertime rest, the Mediterranean has dreamt of "old palaces and towers" along Baiae’s bay, and he was “quivering” at the memory of an “intenser day.”

Baiae’s Bay: Shelly wrote in a letter: “The ruins of its antique grandeur standing like rocks in the transparent under our boat...The sea...was so translucent that you could see the hollow caverns clothed with the glaucous sea- mass, and the leaves and branches of these delicate weeds pave the unequal bottom of the water.”

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 gray with fear, 

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

The sea appears to split into "chasms” (gorges) and "grow grey with fear" as they tremble at the power of the wind, as described in this stanza of Ode to the West Wind. 

Once more, this stanza reflects the speaker's going overboard in praising the wind. It equally suggests that the ocean here is shown to be subservient to the West Wind’s unusual powers. The speaker is extolling the west wind as if he is singing a hymn for God. The wind is depicted so mighty that even nature itself fears in its sight.

After this extraordinary praising, the poet again invokes the wind.

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 seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven 

The speaker starts to express his own desires in greater detail. He wishes he were a "dead leaf" a "swift cloud," or a wave that could experience the "power" and "might" of the West Wind. He says that this act would give him a taste of that freedom that the west wind experiences. Then talking about his childhood the speaker seems to be wondering whether he has grown weaker or if the wind has grown stronger since his youth. He believes that as a little child, he may have been on close to "outstrip" the wind. Yet his childhood "seemed a vision" since it was so far away and so long ago. The speaker is obviously drawing a comparison between the wind's might and the weakness that has set in as he ages.

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 chain'd and bow'd
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud. 

Here, the speaker finally comes to his request. Until now, he has been asking the wind to hear him, but he has not made any specific requests. Now, he compares himself to a man “in prayer in [his] sore need,” and he begs the wind to “lift [him] as a wave, a leaf, a cloud.” He longs to be at the mercy of the wind, whatever may come of it.

In the final line, he refers to himself as one who is in the final stages of his life when he says, “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed”. Just like the wind swept away the dead leaves of Autumn, the speaker calls for the wind to sweep him away, old and decaying as he is. The line may also allude to Shelley’s personal sufferings, including the loss of his children, Clara and William, within a year.

The speaker claims that despite him once being like the wind, "tameless...swift, and proud," the weight of all of his years of life has caused him to bend down.

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. 

Again, the speaker beseeches the West Wind. He prays the wind to turn him into its lyre.

This image is related to the Aeolian harp, a recurrent metaphor in Romantic poetry. It is a

stringed musical instrument used in ancient Greece. Here, the speaker compares himself to the wind's "lyre," or harp. He wish to serve as the instrument on which the West Wind will perform its own music, just as it does in the forest's tree branches. He wants to be like the dead leaves which fall to the ground when the wind blows. Both the speaker and the forest's trees are deteriorating; the trees are shedding their leaves, and he has suffered many setbacks in life. But it doesn't matter; if the wind uses both of them as instruments, they will produce lovely, gloomy music that sounds like it belongs in the autumn.

Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one! 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

The speaker now adopts a different strategy, pleading with the wind to become him rather than play him like an instrument. He wants to completely merge with the wind's "fierce" spirit, possibly even having that spirit take the place of his own. Impetuous: hasty, impulsive. The speaker likens his thoughts to fallen leaves, speculating that the West Wind would carry them across the globe in a similar manner to how leaves are carried, turning them into a rich compost from which new growth will emerge in the spring. In this manner, even if his thoughts are useless, at least they will help something better grow.

*This is yet another instance of the wind being referred to as a deity. Some sects in the Christian faith hold that in order to experience a new life, a person must receive the Holy Spirit into his physical being.

And, by the incantation of this verse, 

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

The speaker requests that the wind "drive [his] dead thoughts over the universe" so that, even as he passes away, others may adopt his ideas and give them "new birth." With the words he is saying right now, he believes that this may even occur.

The speaker uses the image of the wind playing him as an instrument once more, but this time he says that the wind will blow its own prophecy via his mouth.

A contemporary critic, Dr Oliver Tearle , comments on these lines: “Shelley concludes ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by entreating the wind to scatter the poet’s ‘dead thoughts’ (ideas he’s abandoned) across the universe. Much as scattering of the withered dead leaves allows the seeds of next year’s trees to take root and grow, so Shelley believes it is only by having his old ideas blown away that he can dream of new ones, and with it, a new world, ‘a new birth’.”
He further says: “Shelley sees his poem as a religious incantation or chant, which will magically make the wind scatter his thoughts like leaves – or, indeed, like ashes and sparks in a fireplace. The ashes may be dead and burnt, but by moving they often burst into new life, and new sparks emerge from the ashes.”

Dr Tearle presents some other interesting observations on the last famous line:
In the famous closing words of the poem, “O Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”, Shelley returns to the earlier imagery of the poem involving the west wind scattering the dead leaves to pave the way for the new trees next spring; the poem ends on a resounding note of hope for what the future could bring – for Shelley, nature, and for the political world.
The poem is personal as well as political: the west wind is the wind that would carry Shelley back from Florence (where he was living at the time) to England, where he wanted to help fight for reform and revolution. Personal and political are thus closely linked in ‘Ode to the West Wind‟, which constantly draws attention to the aural potential of the wind: it cannot be seen (though its effects certainly can), but it can be heard, much as the poet‟s words could be word, announcing and calling for political reform.

About the Author : Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)

• He is considered among the prominent romantic poets. 
• He was notorious among his contemporaries for his liberal, rebellious and atheistic views. 
• He was a close friend of another famous poet, Lord Byron. 
• Shelley married Mary Godwin, the author of a Gothic novel, Frankenstein, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. 
• Shelley died on July 8, 1822, when his boat sank off the coast of Italy. He had been making his way back to his home on the Bay of Lerici in the country‘s north-west after visiting his friends, Byron and James Leigh Hunt.

Romantic Poet: 

Shelley exemplified the main themes of romanticism such as, restlessness, melancholy, rebellion against power, interaction. With nature, the power of poetry, the visionary imagination, the quest of ideal love and the wild, spirit, perpetually seeking freedom.

Shelly’s important works:

• Classical poems (best known for): Ozymandias, 1818, ode to the west wind, 1819, To a Skylark, 1820, the cloud, 1820.
• Political Ballad: The masque of anarchy, 1819.
• Visionary poems: Queen Mab, 1813, Alastor 1816, the revolt of Islam 1818, Adonais 1821 and his last unfinished work, the triumph of life, 1822.
• Drama: The Cenci, 1819 and Prometheus, unbound, 1820.
• Critical essay (unfinished): A defence of Poetry written in 1821 & published in 1840.

Summary: 

Percy Shelley portrays a narrator, who seems to worship the window in the present poem. He consistently uses the capital letter ‘W’ while referring to the wind, indicating that he idolises it. The speaker praises the wind as if praising an omnipotent divine being. He also refers to a certain pagan Greek God. While praising the wind, the speaker even implores, and asks it to carry him away in death once he is confident that it has heard him, hoping that a new life will await him on the other side. 

Background: 

In 1819, while Shelly was residing in Florence, Italy, he wrote the poem. He mentioned it in a footnote that he wrote the poem while seated in the woods near the Arno river on a windy day in October when the poem was released in 1820, alongside his closest drama, Prometheus unbound. During that time, he was depressed over his lack of involvement in the political and social life of his own country.

Shelley wanted his message of reform and revolution to spread, and the wind became the trope for spreading the word of change through the poet-prophet figure.

Some also believe that the poem was written in response to the loss of his son William (born to marry Shelly) in 1819. The ensuing pain influenced Shelly. At the time of composing this poem, Shelly without doubt had the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 in mind. 

Form & Meter

Ode to the West Wind is written in Terza rima, or "third rhyme”, which is an Italian rhyme pattern. Dante is most known for using it in The Divine Comedy. The idea with terza rima is that the lines are in groups of three, and the middle rhyme of one set of three becomes the outside rhyme of the next set, which means the rhyme scheme is "ABA, BCB, CDC" and so on. The reason this form is difficult to finish is that each group of three lines has a new center that requires the employment of rhyme in another set of three lines. In order to solve this issue, Shelley adds a couplet to the end of each group of four three-line stanzas.

In addition, Shelley has divided the poem into cantos, which are the Italian term for chapters in poetry. Shelley also experiments with another form in this poem: the sonnet. Each of the five cantos in "Ode to the West Wind" consists of fourteen lines that conclude with a couplet.

Themes in the poem

◾️Death and Rebirth

Since the West Wind is an autumnal wind, it ushers in the "closing night" of the season and sings the "dirge (lament, funeral song) / Of the dying year." In the natural cycle, it not only signals the end but also sets the stage for rebirth. Even if the seeds that the wind pushes seem to go to die, they still contain life that will surface in the spring when they are summoned to bloom.

The impacts of death are being felt by the speaker personally. As his life cycle progresses, time is finally catching up with him. He used to be a "comrade" of the West Wind, living a wild and free life But this time has passed, and now “I fall upon the thorns of life!” the speaker laments.

 ◾️Nature’s power:

The poem emphasizes the strength of nature. The speaker portrays and emphasises the West Wind's enormous power throughout the poem to the level of almost deifying it.

Shelley tries his best to convey that similar to the West Wind, art has great power. It has the power to produce a world-awakening storm. In order to "quicken a new birth" in both himself and the world, the speaker of this poem begs the West Wind to "Make me thy lyre." The speaker's words can now "spread, as from an unextinguish’d hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind" as a result of this awakening in him. These couplets of poetry, like the wind, will have a profound effect on the "unawaken'd earth." They will awaken people to imagination, beauty, and harmony.

Literary devices used in the poem:

1. Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line. Eg: /w/ in “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn‟s being”, /g/ sound in “Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear”.

2. Symbolism: Symbolism uses symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them symbolic meanings. Eg: “dead leaves” are symbols of death and destruction, and “dying year” symbolizes a season’s end.

3. Simile: A figure of speech that compares an object or a person with something else. Eg: “Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing”; “Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed”.

4. Personification: Giving inhuman objects human characteristics is known as personification. Some of the phrases that evoke human emotions in the poem include "Destroyer and Preserver,” "Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams," "The blue Mediterranean, where he lay," and "thou breath of Autumn's being.”

5. Enjambment: “(in verse) the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.” (Oxford) Eg: 

“Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below 

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know.”

6. Anastrophe: a figure of speech in which the normal word order of the subject, the verb, and the object is changed. subject–verb–object ("I like potatoes") might be changed to object–subject–verb ("potatoes I like"). (Wiki). Shelley has used anastrophe in the second line, “leaves dead” instead of dead leaves.