Page 162 - DENG104_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_I

Unit 14: Ode to the West Wind by PB Shelley

14.6 Rhyme, Form and Meter Notes

Form
Each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” contains five stanzas—four three-line
stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each
part follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line rhyme scheme employed by Dante
in his Divine Comedy. In the three-line terza rima stanza, the first and third lines rhyme, and
the middle line does not; then the end sound of that middle line is employed as the rhyme for
the first and third lines in the next stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of
the last three-line stanza. Thus each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” follows this
scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.

Ode, terza rima, and more

The most important form here is the ode. We talked about that in the “What’s Up With the
Title?” section, so you can go and read about it there. Let’s think about the rhyme scheme and
meter in this poem. A lot of, ahem, other study sites will tell you that “Ode to the West Wind”
is written in terza rima and leave it at that. That’s true, but terza rima is just one of the
traditional poetic forms that Shelley is playing with here. Let’s cover both of them. Ready?
First, there’s terza rima, or “third rhyme,” an Italian rhyme scheme most famously used by
Dante in The Divine Comedy. (Go check out what Shmoop has to say about Dante’s Inferno.)
Shelley’s grabbing some extra poetic street cred by using a form associated with the great
Italian poet who came before him.
The idea with terza rima is that the lines are in groups of three, and the middle rhyme of one
set of three becomes the outside rhyme of the next set. Handbooks of literary terms will tell
you that this means the rhyme scheme is “ABA, BCB, CDC” and so on. We prefer to think of
it in a sandwich metaphor: the filling of each “sandwich” (or stanza) becomes the bread of the
next one. Of course, it’s hard to end this form, because every set of three lines has a new
middle that demands another set of three lines to use its rhyme. Shelley fixes this problem by
following each set of four three-line stanzas with a couplet.

As if using terza rima weren’t enough to make “Ode to the West Wind” reminds us of Dante,
Shelley also divides the poem into cantos, the Italian poetry equivalent of chapters.
In this poem, Shelley also plays with another form: the sonnet. “Wait a minute,” we hear you
saying. “This doesn’t look like a sonnet. For one thing, a sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in
iambic pentameter.” Not too fast: “Ode to the West Wind” has five cantos, each of which is
fourteen lines and ends in a couplet. That sounds suspiciously like an English sonnet. (Italian
sonnets often don’t end in couplets.) And even though there’s a lot of variation in the number
of syllables in each line, one could maybe generally call this iambic pentameter. Think about
lines seven and eight: “The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, / Each like a corpse within
its grave, until”—hear that? Some iambic pentameter is peeking through here. So “Ode to the
West Wind” is almost like a miniature sonnet sequence of five sonnets.
OK, so what’s the take-away message about the form and meter of this ode? Well, don’t forget
that Shelley is an English expatriate living in Italy, writing, at least in part, about how frustrating
it is for him to feel totally out of sorts in a different country. The poem imagines one solution
to an individual feeling weak in the face of the world: unity between Man and Nature. But the
form creates another solution: unity between a prestigious Italian rhyme scheme and a famous
English style of sonnet writing. That way, Shelley the Englishman in Italy brings his two
countries closer together with the structure of the poem.

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