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Ode to the West Wind

A Text Analysis

Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his Ode to the West Wind, one of his best known lyrics, in autumn 1819, only three years before his accidental death during his unfortunate sailing from Leghorn to Lerici, and according to what he himself wrote it “was conceived and chiefly 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. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions." The ode is a lyric poem of a certain length divided into five sonnet units of 14-lined  stanzas of iambic pentameter, each of the stanzas containing four tercets and a closing couplet where the rime scheme is aba, bcb, cdc,  ded, ee. and, even if this is a variant of the original pattern, he here employed the "terza rima," an Italian measure first  used, among the many, by Dante Alighieri in his well-known poem La Divina Commedia, which was, however, of common use by the English poets of the Second Romantic Generation, notably Byron. For its stanzas marked by uniform length and arrangement, it may be reasonably defined as a Horatian ode according to the English Romantic tradition which produced three types of odes: the Pindaric ode, the  Cowley-style ode and the ones modelled after the style of the Latin poet Horace. The surface of the poem is quite simple since the West Wind is the main character throughout the lines and the first three stanzas respectively deal with its action on the land, the sky and the sea which, on their turn, symbolically stand for the natural elements earth, air and water. Thus the romantic theme of the appreciation and lyrical exploitation of Nature is soon set up and, like Wordsworth who had already considered and developed the connection between Man and Nature, Shelley expresses this idea too but he enlarges and deepens it to such an extent that the natural environment, more than an inborn part of the inner side of Man, becomes a sort of mirror where he is able to se not only himself, like Byron e.g., but the very society too. If the fourth stanza, which resumes the previous ones, is in fact connected with the poet himself, the fifth deals with poetry itself and its impact – or what Shelley wanted it to be – on his readers and society as a whole and not only in a metaphorical way.

The poem starts with the invocation to the wind, which, beside being written in capital letters, is addressed as “wild”, symbolizing its blind power and careless strength, and “west”, defining its autumnal nature, and is introduced to the reader while blowing all over the earth bringing destruction and death everywhere. Until the second line of the third tercet many are the symbols of death such as the adjectives dead, dark, wintry, cold and low; the nouns ghosts, corpse and grave; the colours themselves, more than the last chromatic explosion of Nature before wintertime, are seen as something sick showing the deep planted seed of disease with the escalation from yellow to black then to pale and finally to a hue of red which, far from conveying any impressions of joy or passion, is defined as hectic thus being associated with tubercholosis, a disease which, in Shelley’s times, brought to death. At the last line of this tercet the general atmosphere suddenly changes when the poet thinks of the springtime wind which brings a new life to the earth awakening from his deep wintry sleep. In the closing couplet the wind is called destroyer and preserver at the same time and, even if this may only sound as a mere figure of speech – an oxymoron in this case -, it is not that simple since, from a biological point of view, the autumnal wind is both a destroyer, as it puts an end to summertime and strips the land and trees bare, and a preserver, as there would be nothing but a sandy desert after an endless summer whereas, from a philosophical point of view, life and death are deeply interwoven and one couldn’t exist without the other. This cyclical alternation, more than Plato’s theories which deeply influenced Shelley, reminds whether the obsessive succession of life and death to which, according to Buddhism, every living being is slave or the oriental religious belief of the Trimurti which is formed by three Gods standing for creation, destruction and preservation. The double shape of the wind, when seen both from a mechanical and speculative point of view, establishes the two levels of the ode itself which is to be read both in its surface, the description of the autumnal wind blowing over the three parts of planet Earth; land, sea, sky,  and in its symbols which express the poet’s thoughts and ideas. Moreover, it is the key idea of the composition since such an idea won’t be repeated so explicitly anymore but in the final couplet.

In the second stanza the poet’s attention shifts to the sky and his vision is absolutely apocalyptic with the description of an approaching storm which upsets the universe and will end in destruction and blind violence. There are no symbols of life here and what the reader sees is the primitive uncontrollable violence of the natural elements, so dear to the poets of the second Romantic Generation as for instance in the bleak and powerful natural background of Byron’s Manfred, which has aroused fear and terror in men and animals since the beginning of the world. The airy element seems very congenial to Shelley who, throughout this stanza, is able to convey the images of a violence, even rendered with the simile between the lightning and the savage hair of a fierce Mćnad  caught in the wildest moment of her pagan feast, which will bring to the final destruction expressed through images such as closing nights, vast sepulchre or black rain. In the first tercet, as to remind the reader of the general presence of the wind all over nature, there is the simile between the clouds driven all across the sky and the decaying leaves of the first stanza scattered upon the earth. At the end of the third line, with a sort of strange structural resemblance with the first section where it gave way to springtime, the wind is here seen in his most destructive side and is called dirge of the dying year, an expression which acts in a double way when picturing its howling both on the physical side, with its mournful sound, and on the idealistic side, suggesting it’s a lament for the end as in his later to come “A Dirge”, written during his last year of life, where Shelley himself, differently from what he thinks here, will not consider any further possible rebirth.

The third stanza is dedicated to the sea, thus the element here is water, seen under the powerful action of the wind which alters and modifies both its surface and depths. The first three tercets deal with the Mediterranean sea, which Shelley well knew because his long stay in Italy and his passion for sea and sailing, and, as if it was a living being endowed with conscience, its summer dreams before it is awakened by the west wind. This first part is as beautiful as peaceful since what we are told here is about a summer dream of the sea itself which gives Shelley the chance to describe a quiet scene of a coastline reflecting in quiet waters. This scene represents the interaction between the land and the sea – as a consequence the interpenetration between different worlds - under the action of the wind since earthly objects such as palaces and towers which stand still on the ground are reflected into the sea with a slight motion, indicated by the verb quivering, as the waves gently move under the action of a sweet summer breeze. Moreover, we are shown a sort of zooming-in cinematic technique since Shelley’s eyes shift from the coast to the sea surface and then to its depth which, just like the whole section, gives a sense of peaceful beauty so high as to be impossible to be conceived and described by a limited human mind. At the last line of the third tercet, just like it happens in the previous stanzas, there is a sudden change when the scene, after an astonishing horizontal movement in space, goes from a small and closed sea, as the Mediterranean is, to the Atlantic ocean seen in its deepest part which, however, feels the action of the wind and gives out a fearful answer. This stanza, like the previous ones, ends with the poet’s dramatic invocation to the wind O hear! since he isn’t telling anything to the wind but he’s simply describing is action upon the land, the sky and the sea; his request is pronounced in the fifth stanza only while the fourth stanza is used to describe himself and his relationship with the wind.

The first three lines of this stanza show Shelley’s wish to be simply a part of nature so as to be able to interact with him like he did when he was in his boyhood, a general theme for the following two tercets too, and, keeping the same elemental order he has developed in the previous stanzas, he uses three images – a leaf, a cloud, a wave – of three things he wishes he was turned in. How different he is here from Wordsworth’s quiet and peaceful identification with the cloud in his Daffodils or his idealistic vision of nature as a link in a man’s life as he did in The Rainbow when his present time and age may at once interact with his past and future thanks to the interpenetration with Nature. There’s no possible idealistic shift in time in Shelley’s line since the memory of his childhood is not a source of joy but of sorrow and pain, since is desire of being a child is an impossible wish nullified and annihilated, one more time, at the last line of the third tercet where he has the painful conscience of the transience from the world of Innocence to the one of Experience when his hope turns in an impossible prayer with the highly dramatic coming back on the earth expressed through the words I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed. What we are faced here with is  (....to be continued)

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