Talk:Ode to the West Wind
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Ode to the West Wind - P.B Shelley
Article by B. S Prema, Retd. Professor of English, A.P.S College, Bangalore
P.B Shelley is perhaps the most romantic of all the Romantic poets. In his short life, he wrote much poetry of the highest quality in all the principal verse forms. Some critics feel the title ‘Poet’s poet’ fits P.B Shelley better than any other poet in English literature. He is a revolutionary by nature and much of his poetry is unconventional. He is a ‘dreamer of dreams’. In his ‘Defense of Poetry’, Shelley refers to poets as the ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. He thought that he could reform the world by his writing.
Shelley composed ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in a wood near Florence. It was a day when the West Wind blew strongly, heralding a storm at the beginning of the Autumnal rains. The whole poem takes the form of a prayer. ‘Ode to the West Wind’ expresses Shelley’s sense of significance of the forces of Nature as seen in the West wind. The West wind – an invisible power, symbolized for the poet the destruction and rejuvenation or revival of life. The ode begins with the description of the power of the Autumn wind. The wild West wind is both a ‘destroyer’ and a ‘preserver’. The dry decayed leaves are driven away by the wind ‘like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing’. Shelley makes the concept clear and concrete with the help of this suggestive simile. The dead leaves are the ghosts. The force of the wind is akin to the supernatural power of the magician. The colors of the leaves – ‘Yellow, black, pale and hectic red’ are suggestive of various diseases. The large number of leaves are compared to the ‘multitudes’ struck by ‘pestilence’.
The wind, the same time, deposits the seeds all over the earth to lie in their wintry bed’. The wind acts as a ‘charioteer’ to scatter the seeds. The seeds themselves are ‘winged’ so that they can smoothly sail with the wind. The earth is the bed and as the seeds have to lie there till the advent of the spring, the bed is ‘Wintry’. The poet is not satisfied with the metaphors. He must make himself more explicit. Hence the simile ‘each like a corpse within its grave’. It is in the spring these seeds come to life filling the earth with ‘living hues and odors. The poet gives another suggestive simile – The ‘sweet buds’ like flocks of sheep’ which go from one pasture to another, spring higher and higher feeding on air. Shelley characterizes the west wind as the ‘Wild Spirit’. It is all pervasive and is a ‘destroyer’ as well as ‘preserver’. He exhorts the west wind to listen to him.
The Wild Spirit moving everywhere affects the sky also. The West wind destroys the clouds and causes rainfall. Water or rain is the symbol of life. The ‘loose clouds’ are ‘like earth’s decaying leaves’. The west wind drives the clouds away causing ‘Angles of rain and lightening’. The dark cloudy sky is ‘Like the bright hair uplifted from the head of some fierce Maenad’. Shelley writes of the Maenad figures “The tremendous spirit of superstition seems to have caught them in its whirlwind and to bear them over the earth as the rapid evolutions of a tempest have the ever changing trunk of a water-sprout or as a torrent of a mountain river whirls the autumnal leaves resistless along in its full eddies. The hair loose and flowing seems caught in the tempest of their own tumultuous motion”. (Maenads are the women worshippers of Bacchus – the God of wine). Palgrave observes “May we not call this the most vivid, sustained and impassioned amongst all the Shelley’s magical personifications of Nature?”. The dark long wavy flowing bright hair of these drunken women worshippers of the God of wine comes to the mind of the poet when he looks at the dark sky laden with rainy clouds heralding a storm. The rustling sound of the west wind as it blows along is the ‘dirge of the dying year’. The wind sings the song of lamentation (dirge) as the year is coming to a close with the onset of winter. The entire world is imagined as a ‘vast sepulchral’ because of the gloomy, frozen appearance. The vault or the roof of this vast tomb is rightly ‘the congregated might of vapors’.
“The wind itself is the river on which the forest of the sky shakes down its foliage of clouds and these are tossed upwards like a Maenad’s uplifted hair or trail downwards, like the locks of Typhoon, the vanguard of the tempest. In gathered mass behind, the congregated might of vapors is rising to vault the heaven like a sepulchral dome’ writes Stopford A Brooke.
The poet, here conceives of the west wind as the force which blows up the clouds and sings the dirge of the departing year. The images here are not as concrete as they are in the first stanza. They are of the air and not of the earth. Shelley makes a profuse use of onomatopoeia. The stanza abounds in heavy sounds and culminates in the storm and fury of the last line.
The west wind does not spare the seas. It disturbs the calm, unruffled surface of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The picture in the first few lines is the calmness of summer. The verse is responsive to the mood and is less tumultuous. The Mediterranean sleeps to the lullaby of his own clear waters. He dreams of the old palaces and towers, quivering with the slight motion of the water. The beauty of the ancient ruins overgrown with moss and sea flowers is so fascinating that the sense faints picturing them. The vegetation at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean or in lakes and rivers also is affected by the west wind. The dual aspect of distinction and preservation of the west wind is once again emphasized.
Shelly now makes an appeal to the west wind. All the enthusiasm of his boyhood has been chilled. The heavy and dull weight of the world’s customs and conventions has crushed his impetuous spirit. He desires to be transformed into a dead leaf, a swift cloud or a wave so that he may be lifted from the harsh painful realities of life. He is desperate. He would not have prayed to the west wind if he had retained a part of his idealism and optimism. He passionately appeals to the west wind to lift him as a wave, a leaf, a cloud and to save him from further agony.
The poet strikes a note of reconciliation. He exhorts the west wind to make him its ‘lyre’. He appeals to the wind to give him enough strength to face the sordid realities of life. He desires the wind to drive away from him the despair that has overtaken him at present and to assist him in proclaiming to the world his prophecy – Man need not be bereft of hope. Hope is there to see man through every turmoil of life. There is continuity of thought from the first stanza to the last. Just as the wind purifies the woods, so does it sweeten the sky, clarify the ocean and make stronger and sounder the heart of man. With each fresh variation of thought, the poet gives a flood of superb imagery, strengthening the main theme. As in the outside world so in the poet’s soul, the wind is both destroyer and preserver. The poem passes from the individual to the universal. The dead ideas, the old world will go and a new world will emerge with the spring laden with fresh sweet promises for the suffering humanity.
“…………………………………… O Wind
If Winter comes, can spring be far behind?”
The ode is a paean prophetic of victory. Shelley shows himself to be an artist as well as a prophet. The greatness of the ode is partly due to its music. Shelley has indeed an inner and an outer music. The whole effect of his metre and the very sound and sense of his language can be changed by a change in his mood. Though it can be clearly followed, both metre and mood are in the control of his art. “His verse is responsive to the influence of every mood, trembles and sighs with alternating despondency and hope”. In Shelley’s method of dealing with words his ‘inner music’ has a profound effect on his ‘outer music’ making each a living instrument of his sorrow and joy. Rhythm comes naturally to him as breathing. “Shelley’s rhymes seem themselves to form the climax of his music, the emphasis of his passion, and sometimes to be very cries from the soul”. In the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ the verse sweeps along with the elemental rush of the wind it celebrates. The power, the force of the west wind in the first two stanzas is driven home to us by the use of the harsh letters like w, b and d, which culminates in the storm and fury of the last line. From the third stanza, the verse begins to flow soft. There is a pathetic touch in the fourth and the tome of an earnest appeal in the last stanza.
“Shelley passes from magnificent union of himself with Nature and magnificent realization of Her storm and peace to equally great self description, and then mingles all nature and all himself together that he may sing the restoration of mankind. There is no song in the whole of our literature, more passionate, more penetrative, more full of force by which the idea and its form are united into one creation” (S.A Brooke)
