Page 156 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Unit 14: Ode to the West Wind by PB Shelley

Lines 13-14 Notes

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!
• The speaker appeals to the West Wind twice more, describing it as a “Wild Spirit” that’s
everywhere at once.
• The West Wind is both “Destroyer and Preserver”; it brings the death of winter, but also
makes possible the regeneration of spring.
• Now we find out (sort of) what the speaker wants the wind to do: “hear, oh, hear!” For
the moment, that’s all he’s asking – just to be listened to. By the wind.

Lines 15-18

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

• The speaker continues to describe the West Wind.
• This time, he describes the wind as having clouds spread through it the way dead leaves
float in a stream. Leaves fall from the branches of trees, and these clouds fall from the
“branches” of the sky and the sea, which work together like “angels of rain and lightning”
to create clouds and weather systems.
• Yep, there’s a storm coming!

Lines 18-23

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy 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.
• The speaker creates a complex simile describing the storm that the West Wind is bringing.
The “locks of the approaching storm”—the thunderclouds, that is—are spread through
the airy “blue surface” of the West Wind in the same way that the wild locks of hair on
a Mænad wave around in the air. Got that?

• Let’s put it in SAT analogy form: thunderclouds are to the West Wind as a Mænad’s
locks of hair are to the air.
• A Mænad is one of the wild, savage women who hang out with the god Dionysus in
Greek mythology. The point here about Mænads is that, being wild and crazy, they don’t
brush their hair much.
• Oh, and the poet reminds us that these Mænad-hair-like clouds go vertically all the way
through the sky, from the horizon to the centre.

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