Ode to the west wind assignment

By surrendering to the creative powers of the mind, the poet unites his spirit with the world’s spirit across time. The west wind, Zephirus, represents that animate universe in Shelley’s ode. Shelley implores the West Wind to make him its “ lyre” (57), that is, its wind-harp. “ The Defence of Poetry” begins with this same metaphor: Shelley writes that “ Man is an instrument over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an ? lian lyre; which move it, by their motion, to ever-changing melody” (?? 7). This is not just a pretty figure of speech from nature. We now recognize that poetic inspiration itself arises from a “ wild,” “ uncontrollable,” and “ tameless” source like the wind, buffeting the mind’s unconscious. Long before cognitive psychology taught us this fact, Shelley clearly saw that no one could watch her or his own language process as it worked. Like all procedural memories, it is recalled only in the doing.

We are unconscious of its workings, what contributes both content and form, semantics and syntax, to our utterances. He writes that “ the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure” (?? 285).

The country graveyard has spirits, to be sure, but they are ghosts of dead friends. No natural power inspires elegies or epitaphs. These writings reflect the traditional order by which melancholy, sentimental minds put order to nature. Gray quotes from many poets, as if asserting humanity’s strength in numbers. Like Wordsworth’s solitary reaper, Shelley stands alone, singing in a strange voice that inspires but perplexes traditional listeners. He cries out to a wind-storm, “ Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit! Eighteenth-century poets like Pope would have laughed this audaciousness to scorn, but then they would never have had the courage to go out into the storm and, like Shakespeare’s Lear in the mad scene, shout down the elements. Even should we not empathize with Shelley, his ode has a good claim to being one of the very greatest works of art in the Romantic period. Its heroic grandeur attains a crescendo in the fifth and last part with a hope that English speakers everywhere for nearly two centuries have committed to memory and still utter, often unaware of its source: “ If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? Annotating editors have looked in vain for signs that Shelley resuscitated old phrases and other men’s flowers in this ode. What he writes is his own. It emerges, not in Gray’s often quoted end-stopped phrases, lines, and couplets, but in passionate, flowing sentences. The first part, all 14 lines, invokes the West Wind’s attention in one magnificent sentence. Five lines in the first part, two of which come at the end of a stanza, enjamb with the following lines. Few poets have fused such diverging poetic forms as terza rima, built on triplets with interwoven rhymes, and the sonnet, contrived with couplets, quatrains, sestets, and octaves.

Yet even this compelling utterance, unifying so much complexity in an onward rush, can be summarized and analyzed. The opening three stanzas invoke the West Wind (in order) as a driving force over land, in the sky, and under the ocean, and beg it to “ hear” the poet (14, 28, 42). In the first stanza, the wind as “ Destroyer and preserver” (14) drives “ dead leaves” and “ winged seeds” to the former’s burial and the latter’s spring rebirth. The second and third stanzas extend the leaf image.

Were toiling upward in the night. “ Home is the sailor, home from sea,” and “ Under the bludgeonings of chance / My head is bloody, but unbowed” come from? (Longfellow’s “ The Ladder of St. Augustine,” Stevenson’s “ Requium,” and Henley’s “ Invictus. “) Yet a pleasure just as keen comes from appreciating how a piece of music or a poem harmonizes its melodies. The longer we read a poem, the more perfected become its variations of those lines that live in our memory. “ If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? “, in this way, perfects what came before. The West Wind is the breath of personified Autumn.

When Shelley invokes this breath, “ dirge” (21), and “ voice” (41), he has in mind a fellow traveller, a “ comrade” (49) like himself, no less a human being for being a season of the year, no less an individual than the “ close bosom-friend” in Keats’ “ To Autumn. ” Two other figures recur to Shelley in the Arno forest that day. The stormy cirrus clouds driven by the wind remind him of the “ bright hair” and “ locks” of “ some fierce M? nad” (20-23). He imagines the wind waking a male and dreaming “ blue Mediterranean” (29-30). Like Shelley the boy, these minor fellow travellers help humanize Autumn and his speaking power.