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Ode To The West Wind

Ode to the West Wind is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1819, where the speaker addresses the west wind as a symbol of death and decay, welcoming it for the promise of rejuvenation and rebirth. The poem explores themes of transformation, with the speaker expressing a desire to use poetry to promote societal and artistic renewal. Ultimately, the west wind is portrayed as both a destructive and creative force, embodying the cycle of death and rebirth in nature and human experience.

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84 views5 pages

Ode To The West Wind

Ode to the West Wind is a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1819, where the speaker addresses the west wind as a symbol of death and decay, welcoming it for the promise of rejuvenation and rebirth. The poem explores themes of transformation, with the speaker expressing a desire to use poetry to promote societal and artistic renewal. Ultimately, the west wind is portrayed as both a destructive and creative force, embodying the cycle of death and rebirth in nature and human experience.

Uploaded by

zafar37768
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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 “Ode to the West Wind” Introduction

o “Ode to the West Wind” is a poem written by the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe
Shelley. According to Shelley, the poem was written in the woods outside Florence, Italy
in the autumn of 1819. In the poem, the speaker directly addresses the west wind. The
speaker treats the west wind as a force of death and decay, and welcomes this death
and decay because it means that rejuvenation and rebirth will come soon. In the final
two sections of the poem, the speaker suggests that he wants to help promote this
rebirth through his own poetry—and that rejuvenation he hopes to see is both political
and poetic: a rebirth of society and its ways of writing.

 “Ode to the West Wind” Summary


o 1.

You, the unruly west wind, are the essence of the Fall. You are invisible, but you scatter
the fallen leaves: they look like ghosts running away from a witch or wizard. The leaves
are yellow and black, white and wild red. They look like crowds of sick people. You carry
the seeds, as if you're their chariot, down to the earth where they'll sleep all winter. They
lie there, cold and humble, like dead bodies in their graves, until your blue sister, the
Spring wind, blows her trumpet and wakes up the earth. Then she brings out the buds.
They are like flocks of sheep; they feed in the open air. And she fills the meadows and
the hills with sweet smells and beautiful colors. Unruly west wind, moving everywhere:
you are both an exterminator and a savior. Please listen to me!

2.

In the high and whirling reaches of the sky, you send the clouds twirling: they look like
dead leaves, shaken loose from the branches of the heavens and the sea. They are like
angels, full of rain and lightning. Or they are scattered across the blue sky, like the
blond hair of a wildly dancing girl who is a follower of Dionysus. The clouds stretch from
the horizon to the top of the sky like the hair of the coming storm. West wind, you sad
song of the end of the year. The night sky will be like the dome of a vast tomb, the
clouds you gathered like archways running across it. And from the solid top of that
tomb, dark rain, lightning, and hail will fall down. Listen to me!

3.

You woke the Mediterranean from its summer dreams. That blue sea, which
lay wrapped in its crystal-clear currents, was snoozing near an island made of volcanic
rock in the Bay of Baiae, near Naples. In the waters of the bay you saw the ruins of old
palaces and towers, now submerged in the water's thicker form of daylight. These ruins
were overgrown with sea plants that looked like blue moss and flowers. They are so
beautiful that I faint when I think of them. You—whose path turns the smooth surface of
the Atlantic Ocean into tall waves, while deep below the surface sea-flowers and forests
of seaweed, which have leaves with no sap, hear your voice and turn gray from
fear, trembling, losing their flowers and leaves—listen to me, wind!

4.

If only I was a dead leaf, you might carry me. You might let me fly with you if I was a
cloud. Or if I was a wave that you drive forward, I would share your strength—though I’d
be less free than you, since no one can control you. If only I could be the way I was
when I was a child, when I was your friend, wandering with you across the sky—then it
didn’t seem crazy to imagine that I could be as fast as you are—then I wouldn’t have
called out to you, prayed to you, in desperation. Please lift me up like a wave, a leaf, or
a cloud! I am falling into life’s sharp thorns and bleeding! Time has put me in shackles
and diminished my pride, though I was once as proud, fast, and unruly as you.

5.

Make me into your musical instrument, just as the forest is when you blow through it. So
what if my leaves are falling like the forest’s leaves. The ruckus of your powerful music
will bring a deep, autumn music out of both me and the forest. It will be beautiful even
though it’s sad. Unruly soul, you should become my soul. You should become me, you
unpredictable creature. Scatter my dead thoughts across the universe like fallen leaves
to inspire something new and exciting. Let this poem be a prayer that scatters ashes
and sparks—as though from a fire that someone forgot to put out—throughout the
human race. Speak through me, and in that way, turn my words into a prediction of the
future. O wind, if winter is on its way, isn’t Spring going to follow it soon?


o
Death and Rebirth

Throughout “Ode to the West Wind,” the speaker describes the West Wind as a
powerful and destructive force: it drives away the summer and brings instead winter

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