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

4. Quivering within the wave’s intenser ......... Notes

(a) night (b) day
(c) noon (d) None of these

14.6 Summary

• Addressing the west wind as a human, the poet describes its activities: It drives dead
leaves away as if they were ghosts fleeing a wizard. The leaves are yellow and black,
pale and red, as if they had died of an infectious disease. The west wind carries seeds
in its chariot and deposits them in the earth, where they lie until the spring wind
awakens them by blowing on a trumpet (clarion). When they form buds, the spring
wind spreads them over plains and on hills. In a paradox, the poet addresses the west
wind as a destroyer and a preserver, then asks it to listen to what he says.
• The poet says the west wind drives clouds along just as it does dead leaves after it
shakes the clouds free of the sky and the oceans. These clouds erupt with rain and
lightning. Against the sky, the lightning appears as a bright shaft of hair from the head
of a Mænad. The poet compares the west wind to a funeral song sung at the death of
a year and says the night will become a dome erected over the year’s tomb with all of
the wind’s gathered might. From that dome will come black rain, fire, and hail. Again
the poet asks the west wind to continue to listen to what he has to say.
• At the beginning of autumn, the poet says, the west wind awakened the Mediterranean
Sea lulled by the sound of the clear streams flowing into it from summer slumber near
an island formed from pumice (hardened lava). The island is in a bay at Baiae, a city
in western Italy about ten miles west of Naples. While sleeping at this locale, the
Mediterranean saw old palaces and towers that had collapsed into the sea during an
earthquake and became overgrown with moss and flowers. To create a path for the
west wind, the powers of the mighty Atlantic Ocean divide (cleave) themselves and
flow through chasms. Deep beneath the ocean surface, flowers and foliage, upon hearing
the west wind, quake in fear and despoil themselves. (In autumn, ocean plants decay
like land plants. See Shelley’s note on this subject.) Once more, the poet asks the west
wind to continue to listen to what he has to say.

• The phenomenon alluded to at the end of the third stanza is well known 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
announce it.
• The poet says that if he were a dead leaf (like the ones in the first stanza) or a cloud
(like the ones in the second stanza) or an ocean wave that rides the power of the
Atlantic but is less free than the uncontrollable west wind or if even he were as strong
and vigorous as he was when he was a boy and could accompany the wandering wind
in the heavens and could only dream of traveling faster well, then, he would never
have prayed to the west wind as he is doing now in his hour of need.
• .......Referring again to imagery in the first three stanzas, the poet asks the wind to lift
him as it would a wave, a leaf, or a cloud; for here on earth he is experiencing troubles
that prick him like thorns and cause him to bleed. He is now carrying a heavy burden

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