اطلاعیه

**Angel** · 06-30-2010, 11:39 PM

Poem Summary

Short Summary

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,” and 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 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 were, 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,” to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, “like withered 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?”

Poem Summary

Lines 1-14
In this first of the five sections of the poem, the speaker begins to define the domains and the powers of the West Wind. While stanza II addresses the wind’s influence on the sky, and stanza III discusses its effects on the sea, stanza I describes the wind’s effects on the land. The autumn breezes scatter dead leaves and seeds on the forest soil, where they eventually fertilize the earth and take root as new growth. Both “Destroyer and Preserver” (line 14), the wind ensures the cyclical regularity of the seasons. These themes of regeneration and the interconnectedness of death and life, endings and beginnings, runs throughout “Ode to the West Wind.”
The wind is, of course, more than simply a current of air. In Greek and Latin — languages with which Shelley was familiar — the words for “wind,” “inspiration,” “soul,” and “spirit” are all related. Shelley’s “West Wind” thus seems to symbolize an inspiring spiritual power that moves everywhere, and affects everything.
Lines 2-3
These lines ostensibly suggest that, like a sorcerer might frighten away spirits, the wind scatters leaves. But one might also interpret “leaves dead” as forgotten books, and “ghosts” as writers of the past; in this sense, the winds of inspiration make way for new talent and ideas by driving away the memories of the old.
Lines 4-5
The colors named here might simply indicate the different shades of the leaves, but it is also possible to interpret the leaves as symbols of humanity’s dying masses. In this analysis, the colors represent different cultures: Asian, African, Caucasian, and Native American. This idea is supported by the phrase “Each like a corpse within its grave” in line 8 that could indicate that each person takes part in the natural cycle of life and death.
Lines 6-7
Here, the wind is described as a chariot that carries leaves and seeds to the cold earth. This comparison gives the impression that the wind has some of the aspects of those who are associated with chariots — gods and powerful rulers.
Line 8
The leaves are personified as people within their graves, an image that harkens back to lines 4 and 5, where the leaves are considered as diseased “multitudes” of people.
Lines 9-12
In Greek and Roman mythology, the spring west wind was masculine, as was the autumnal wind. Here, the speaker refers to the spring wind as feminine, perhaps to stress its role as nurturer and life-giver. She is pictured as awakening Nature with her energetic “clarion,” which is a type of medieval trumpet.
Lines 13-14
At the conclusion of the first stanza, the speaker identifies the wind as the powerful spirit of nature that incorporates both destruction and continuing life. In fact, these two processes are said to be related; without destruction, life cannot continue. At the end of line 14 is the phrase “Oh hear!” that will be repeated at the end of stanzas 2 and 3. This refrain emphasizes sound, which seems appropriate given that wind, an invisible force, is the poem’s central subject.
Lines 15-28
In stanza II, the wind helps the clouds shed rain, as it had helped the trees shed leaves in stanza I. Just as the dead foliage nourishes new life in the forest soil, so does the rain contribute to Nature’s regenerative cycle.
Lines 16-18
This passage has been heavily attacked by critics like F. R. Leavis for its lack of concreteness and apparently disconnected imagery; others have cited Shelley’s knowledge of science, and the possibility that these poetic phrasings might indeed be based on natural fact. The loose clouds, for example, are probably cirrus clouds, harbingers (or “angels” as it is put in line 18) of rain. As the leaves of stanza I have been shed from boughs, these clouds have been shaken from the heavier cloud masses, or “boughs of Heaven and Ocean” (line 17). In Latin, “cirrus” means “curl” or “lock of hair”; it is thus appropriate that these clouds resemble a Maenad ’s “bright hair” (line 20) and are referred to as the “locks of the approaching storm” (line 23).
Lines 20-23
When Shelley was in Florence, he saw a relief sculpture of four maenads. These worshipers of the Roman god of wine and vegetation, Bacchus (in Greek mythology, Dionysus) were wild, dancing women with streaming hair. Here, the speaker compares the appearance of the cirrus clouds streaked across the horizon with the maenads’ blown tresses. This image seems especially appropriate in that Bacchus/Dionysus is associated with the natural world and the wind and clouds are primary elements of nature.
Lines 23-28
The wail of the wind is compared to a song of grief, as if it were mourning the “dying” year. As the year draws to a close, Nature prepares for the funeral. The coming night is described as a “sepulcher,” a burial tomb that will be marked by lightning and hail from a storm. This last day will end in darkness, under storm clouds.
Lines 29-42
In stanza III, the West Wind wields its power over the sea; but unlike the first two stanzas, this one is introduced by an image of calm, peace, and sensuality. The Mediterranean Sea is pictured as smooth and tranquil, sleeping alongside the old Italian town of Baiae. Once a playground of Roman emperors, Baiae sunk as a result of volcanic activity and is now the bed of a lush underwater garden. But the wind can also “waken” (line 29) the sea and disturb the summer tranquility of the waters by ushering in an autumn storm.
Lines 32-33
In 1818, Shelley himself had sailed past the Bay of Baiae; in a December letter to Thomas Love Peacock, he enthusiastically describes the “ruins of its antique grandeur standing like rocks in the transparent sea under our boat.”
Lines 36-38
Beginning at the end of line 36, the speaker disrupts the peace of the seascape and reminds the West Wind of its power to churn up wild, white-capped surf.
Lines 39-42
The lush sea foliage, which is “sapless” because the plants are underwater, is aware of the wind’s ability to destroy; remembering the havoc of cold weather storms, the vegetation is drained of color, as a person turns pale with fear, or as plant life on Earth fades in the fall. In a note to these lines, Shelley wrote: “The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it.” The natural cycles of death and regeneration thus continue even underwater, with the aid of the West Wind.
Lines 43-56
After three stanzas of describing the West Wind’s power, which are all echoed in the first three lines of Stanza IV, the speaker asks to be moved by this spirit. For the first time in “Ode to the West Wind,” the wind confronts humanity in the form of speaker of the poem. No longer an idealistic young man, this speaker has experienced sorrow, pain, and limitations. He stumbles, even as he asks to be spiritually uplifted. At the same time, he can recall his younger years when he was “tameless, and swift, and proud” like the wind. These recollections help him to call on the wind for inspiration and new life. In this manner, the poem suggests that humans, too, are part of the never-ending natural cycle of death and rebirth.
Lines 47-52
In line 47, the speaker begins to explain that, as an idealistic youth, he used to “race” the wind — and win, in his own mind. But now, as an older man, he could never imagine challenging the wind’s power.
Lines 53-54
In these well-known lines often mocked by Shelley’s detractors, the patterns of sea, earth, and sky are recalled as the speaker asks to be raised from his sorrows by the inspirational West Wind. He seems almost Christ-like in his suffering, the “thorns of life” recalling the crown of thorns worn by Christ during the crucifixion.
Lines 55-56
The Christ-like image of the speaker continues here; his life experiences have been heavy crosses for him to bear and have weighed him down. And yet there still seem to be sparks of life and hope within him. He can still recall when he possessed many of the wind’s powers and qualities.
Lines 57-70
If Stanza IV is the explanation of why the West Wind is being invoked, Stanza V is the prayer itself. The requests of the speaker seem to gather speed much as the wind does; while he begins by asking to be moved by the wind, he soon asks to become one with this power. As a breeze might ignite a glowing coal, the speaker asks for the wind to breathe new life into him and his poetic art. With his last question, the speaker reminds his audience that change is on the horizon, be it personal or natural, artistic or political.
The lyre referred to in line 57 might be the Eolian lyre or harp, its name derived from Eolus, god of the winds. This lyre is a box with strings stretched across an opening. When the wind moves through it, the eolian harp emits musical sounds. Many Romantic writers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his poem “The Eolian Harp,” used the instrument as a symbol for the human imagination that is played upon by a greater power. Here, the speaker asks to be the West Wind’s lyre, its means of music and communication.
Lines 58-62
Here, the speaker seems to accept his sorrows and sufferings; he realizes that the wind’s power may allow him to add harmony to autumn’s music. He is still sad, but he recognizes a sweetness in his pain: he is part of a natural cycle, and will have a chance to begin again as both man and poet. The speaker’s growing strength is hinted at by the powerful exclamations in lines 61 and 62.
Lines 63-64
The wind blew leaves over the forest floor, fertilizing the soil; now, the speaker asks the wind to scatter his timeworn ideas and writings across the earth in hopes of inspiring new thoughts and works. Note the word play on “leaves,” which can be found either on trees or in books.
Lines 65-67
In “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley wrote that “the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.” In asking the wind to fan — and hopefully arouse — the dying embers of his words, the speaker seems to be echoing this idea.
Lines 68-69
These lines recall the angel’s “clarion” of line 10, awakening the earth from wintry slumber. The speaker here asks to become the poet-prophet of the new season of renewal.
Lines 69-70
Shelley originally framed the last two lines as a statement; phrased as a question, the poem ends on a note of expectancy rather than affirmation. The speaker has made his case and plea to assist the wind in the declaration of a new age — but he has not yet received an answer. Along with his audience, he breathlessly awaits a “yes,” delivered on the wings of the wind.

source: sparknotes.com
answers.com

**Angel** · 07-01-2010, 10:50 AM

Symbols

Symbols in Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind”
The West Wind

The West Wind is the object of the speaker’s plea in this poem, the powerful force that could deliver him from his inability to make himself heard or to communicate his ideas to others. Blowing from the west suggests an association with the revolutionary, liberating aspects of the young United States, or perhaps simply a favorable wind for ships returning home to ports in Europe. Associated with autumn, the West Wind brings with it decay and the certainty of a wintry death, but it also makes a spring rebirth possible by clearing away the old dead leaves and planting seeds.

Line 1: The West Wind is the object of an apostrophe at the beginning of this line. This is the first time, and by no means the last, that the speaker will apostrophize the wind. In fact, you could say that this whole poem is one long apostrophe. You might also notice the excessive alliteration in this line: "O wild West Wind" is a bit over the top.

Lines 5-7: The West Wind is personified here as the charioteer of the "winged seeds" that it carries to their dormant rest in the earth during the winter. Shelley will continue to personify the wind throughout the poem, although it never becomes a fully-developed character.

Line 14: The West Wind is described as "Destroyer and Preserver," which some scholars think is an allusion to the Hindu gods Siva and Vishnu. Line 14 also introduces the refrain of "Ode to the West Wind," "O hear!", which appears at the end of the first three cantos.

Lines 18-23: The West Wind becomes part of a complex simile in these lines: the storm clouds spread across the "blue surface" of the wind are like a Mænad’s locks of hair. We know this is a simile and not a metaphor because the word "Like" appears at the beginning of line 20.

Dead Leaves

Dead leaves are referenced no less than five times in this short lyric poem. Dead leaves are the remnants of the previous season which the wind clears away; they’re also a metaphorical representation of the pages of writing and poetry generated by the speaker, or perhaps even the author. Once ideas are put down on paper, they’re printed on the "leaves" of a book. At that point, they seem to be declining.

Lines 2-5: The dead leaves are part of a complicated simile in these lines: dead leaves blown away by the wind are like ghosts running away from an enchanter. When Shelley lists the colors of the leaves as "Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red," we detect an allusion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It’s Death, of course, who rides the pale horse.

Line 16: Here we learn that the clouds are "like Earth’s decaying leaves." In the previous simile, the leaves were the main focus and the simile created an image that told us more about them; here, the clouds are the main focus and the leaves are used as an image that tells us more about them.

Lines 64-66: The speaker compares his thoughts in a simile to "withered leaves," which is a pun on the two meanings of "leaves" – things that drop off trees, but also the pages of a book. Since the speaker himself is a poet who describes his plea to the West Wind as "the incantation of this verse" (65), the pun is even more obvious. However, because this is a very formal poem with heightened diction, we’d prefer to call this a "play on words" instead of a pun.

Funerals

Although there aren’t any literal funerals in "Ode to the West Wind," there’s plenty of funereal imagery and symbolism. We’ve got dirges, corpses, the "dying year," a sepulcher, and ashes, just to name a few. Of course, they don’t all come at once – they’re spread throughout the poem as parts of different metaphors and trains of images. Taken all together, though, 9they make us feel like this poem is a kind of elegy (or lament) just as much as it’s an ode.

Lines 5-12: In an extended simile, Shelley compares seeds to corpses lying in their graves. This is also an allusion to the Christian imagery of the Apocalypse, in which a "Last Trumpet" is blown (here, the Spring blows a "clarion," which is a kind of trumpet) in order to resurrect the bodies of the dead (here, the corpses of the seeds, which will come to life in the spring). For more on this, see "Quotes and Thoughts" under the theme "Mortality."

Lines 23-28: This extended metaphor compares the West Wind to a dirge, the dying year to the dead man in a funeral, and the night sky to the dome of a sepulchre. Toward the end of the metaphor, Shelley’s imagery breaks away from the strict correspondences of the metaphor, and both the wind and the inside of the sepulchre become stormy. It’s almost as though, when the storm breaks, when "Black rain and fire and hail will burst," the metaphor is broken down from inside.

Lines 65-67: The poem becomes a spell, or "incantation," by which the poet hopes to make the West Wind scatter his words, which are metaphorically described as "[a]shes and sparks." Some of the words have the power to light new metaphorical "fires" under other poets and thinkers, while others are already "dead."

The Æolian Harp

The æolian harp was a common parlor instrument in the nineteenth century. Sort of like a wind chime, the æolian harp (or "æolian lyre" or "wind harp") was meant to be left in a windy spot, perhaps a window, so that the wind could play its own natural tunes on the instrument. For Romantic poets like Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, the æolian harp came to represent the way that the individual poet could turn himself into an instrument that expressed something more universal about the natural world. In "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley’s speaker begs the West Wind to treat him as its lyre or trumpet or other instrument.

Lines 57-58: The speaker apostrophizes the West Wind, asking it to make him into a lyre. He actually wants to be turned into a passive instrument or object.

Lines 59-61: Describing the "music" that the West Wind will draw from him as its instrument, the speaker characterizes its "harmonies" as in "tumult," a powerful paradox.

Bodies of Water

Although "Ode to the West Wind" is mostly about, well, the wind, the middle of the poem moves away from the airy breezes and considers a different element: water. This slippage starts to happen in Canto II, where the wind is described as having a "stream" (15) and a "blue surface" (19), which makes it sound like a body of water. We’re also reminded that the clouds being carried by the wind came originally from the water that evaporated from the ocean and that they’ll rain back down into it. In the next canto, we learn how the wind wakes the Mediterranean Sea from his "summer dreams" (29) and chops up the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The water almost washes away the wind for a moment there – but the poem reminds us that the West Wind is always stronger than the calm, passive seas.

Lines 15-17: These lines combine intense imagery of the natural world with a complex extended metaphor. In the metaphor, "decaying leaves" falling from "tangled boughs" onto the earth are compared to the clouds that come from "Heaven and Ocean." In other words, the combination of Heaven, the sky with the sun in it, and Ocean, causes water to evaporate into the sky and form clouds. These clouds then float on the "stream" of the West Wind the way dead leaves float in a real stream.

Line 28: Here the water that has evaporated from the ocean rains back down. To emphasize the violence and power of the storm, Shelley uses ten one-syllable words in this line, creating a strong, harsh sound as is read aloud.

Lines 29-30: The Mediterranean Sea is personified here as a dreaming man, whom the wind can "waken" from "his summer dreams" (29).

Lines 37-41: In three of these lines, the verb is placed at the end of the line. This creates an enjambment that drives the reader from one line to the next; this is rather like what’s actually happening at this point in the poem: the Atlantic is splitting itself into "chasms" for the West Wind.

source:shmoop.com

**Angel** · 07-01-2010, 11:02 AM

The poet’s signature style

What is the poet’s signature style?

Flights of Philosophical Fancy

You know you’re reading Shelley when the color red is "hectic," the earth is "dreaming," the surges are "aery," and the trumpets all play prophecies. Shelley belonged to a philosophical movement called "neo-Platonism," which held that there was a perfect world of "forms" out there somewhere, and his resulting idealism usually causes him to leave the Earth entirely behind and soar up into the heavens with the "angels of rain and lightning" and "Spirit[s] fierce." The most down-to-earth image in "Ode to the West Wind" is Baiæ’s Bay, an obscure area near Naples where ancient Romans went on their vacations; everything else literally happens in the sky, in heaven, or at the bottom of the ocean.

source:shmoop.com

اطلاعیه

Ode to the West Wind

Ode to the West Wind

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