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Elective English–II

Notes 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 seem’d a vision,—I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

O lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.
Make me thy lyre, ev’n 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 wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence,
and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating,
was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw,
at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and
lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.
The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is wellknown to naturalists.
The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathizes with that of the
land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it.

13.2 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

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