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Unit 14: Ode to the West Wind by PB Shelley: Detailed Study

Why Should I Care? Notes

Shmoop cannot tell a lie: caring about Percy Bysshe Shelley can be hard. He’s probably the
most difficult of the Romantic poets to fall in love with. Luckily, he’s not the most difficult
poet. He’s hard to love, but not too hard to understand.
What are we talking about? Well, you may have heard from someone, like an English teacher,
that good poetry has certain characteristics: it’s concrete instead of abstract; it’s detailed instead
of general; it’s visceral instead of spiritual. Basically, what we think of as a “good poem” these
days just isn’t one of the abstract flights of fancy that you tend to get from the neo-Platonic,
head-in-the-clouds Percy Bysshe Shelley.
It’s not that Shelley doesn’t use detailed imagery or powerful language, because he does. If
you write, “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” in a poem today, though, and send it off
to a prestigious magazine like The New Yorker, its poetry editors would laugh so hard they’d
spray double-shot cappuccino out their noses. That’s if they don’t recognise it as Shelley,
which we hope they will. Anyway, the point is that it’s not hard to get what Shelley means
with this “thorns of life” stuff. Life’s tough, and it’s getting to him, and the speaker of his
poem is exclaiming about it. But it’s hard to understand, well, why we should care about a
poet who can be so melodramatic.

Here’s the thing about Shelley’s “melodrama,” though: it happens because he’s brutally honest
all the time. If he feels like his life is fading away and his ideas stink, he’ll tell you. If he
worries that his poetic philosophy isn’t having the effect he hopes for, he’ll admit it. And if
he feels like being alive is akin to being pricked all over with tiny sharp things and having
your lifeblood slowly oozing out all over, well, he’ll tell you that, too. His passions are right
on the surface. He sees no point in beating around the bush. He’s not going to pretend. More
than any other poet, Shelley will throw you right into his emotional depths and let you sink
or swim. We have a special respect for that kind of honesty and intensity.
Unfortunately, Shelley’s frankness about his feelings just isn’t where it’s at for us today in our
über-ironic world. Sometimes Shelley seems like he has no sense of humour. It’s hard for us
even to say, “I fall upon the thorns of life!” with a straight face. Luckily, Shelley doesn’t just
tell us how he feels. He connects his feelings to larger philosophical and social problems and
tries to understand them in a global context. Sure, this might be a little egocentric—literally–
but it’s way more interesting than being emo-centric. Shelley balances his emotional intensity
with attention to the grand sweep of nature, philosophy, and everything else. He’s the only poet
we know who does it so well, so sit back and enjoy as you start figuring out how it works.

14.1 Detailed Explanations—Ode to the West Wind

Lines 1-5

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes:
• The speaker appeals to the West Wind four times in this first canto, or section, of the
poem. (We don’t find out what he’s actually asking the wind to do for him until the end
of the canto.)

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