Page 161 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Elective English–I

Notes 14.4 Commentary

The wispy, fluid terza rima of “Ode to the West Wind” finds Shelley taking a long thematic
leap beyond the scope of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and incorporating his own art into
his meditation on beauty and the natural world. Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing
its power and its role as both “destroyer and preserver,” and asks the wind to sweep him out
of his torpor “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable
turn, transforming the wind into a metaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that
drives “dead thoughts” like “withered leaves” over the universe, to “quicken a new birth”—
that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here the spring season is a metaphor for a
“spring” of human consciousness, imagination, liberty, or morality—all the things Shelley
hoped his art could help to bring about in the human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his
spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which
will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees. The
thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed
nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed
nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links
nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about
the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.

14.5 Analysis

Symbols

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.
Blowi...

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
representa...

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, a...

The Æolian Harp

The æolian harp was a common parlour 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...

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...

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