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Unit 13: Ode to the West Wind by PB Shelley: Introduction

the last three-line stanza. Thus each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” follows this Notes
scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.

13.3 Analysis

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.

Self Assessment

Choose the correct option:
1. “Ode to the West Wind” follows this scheme:
(a) ABA BCB CDC DED EE. (b) BAC ABC CDE ADE ED
(c) BAB BCB CDC DEC DD (d) None of these

2. Shelley eloped to ………………….with Harriet Westbrook.
(a) Durban (b) Scotland
(c) Sydney (d) None of these
3. The speaker asks the ……….to “make me thy lyre,”
(a) Wind (b) Rain
(c) Cloud (d) None Of these.

4. Drive my dead thoughts over the …………..
(a) Universe (b) World
(c) Country (d) None of these

13.4 Summary

• The speaker invokes the “Wild West Wind” of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves
and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind,
a “destroyer and preserver,” hear him. The speaker calls the wind the “dirge/Of the

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