Shelley, Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind

Ode to the West wind

PART I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odorous plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O, hear!

PART II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s
commotion,
Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou Dirge
Of the dyingt year, to which this closing night
Will be dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!

PART III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his chrystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

PART IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! Lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proudPART V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scqatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

This poem is made up of five parts. Each part has five stanzas; they are four tercets and one couplet. Lines have a regular length and begin with capital Letters. Lines are aligned; there is a regular punctuation. There is a regular rhyme scheme: ABA-BCB-CDC-…In this poem there are some exclamations,some run-on-lines and also some personifications. There many archaisms like “Thou”: There are some similes and there is also one alliteration of W. Shelley describes the landscape near Florence and the Arno river; it is a dark atmosphere.
In the first part: object is the dead leaves; the sense that was involved is the sight; the land is a bed because it becomes a grane. The Spring represents the rebirth, life; while the wind is destroyer in autumn (death), but preserver in spring (rebirth). In the second part: there are the effects of the wind in the sky; the clouds are pushed, are as angels, announcers. In the third part: there are the effects of the wind in the sea; the fourth season, the summer appears.
The fourth part refers to the first three parts because it takes again the effects of the wind in the
earth, in the sky and in the sea. In the fifth part: there is the poet’s thought.