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Unit 4: Ode to the West Wind by P B Shelley

Romantic poet, and possessed an extraordinary capacity for hope, love and joy. Shelley ardently Notes
believed in the possibility of realising an ideal of human gladness as based on beauty. Also, his
moments of despair and gloominess (specifically in book-length poems, for example, Queen
Mab) usually originate from his discontent at seeing that ideal sacrificed to human weakness.
Shelley’s strong feelings about beauty and expression are depicted in poems like Ode to the West
Wind and Ode to a Skylark. In the poems, he cites metaphors from nature to characterise his
relationship to his art. The centre of his artistic philosophy can be found in his significant essay,
A Defence of Poetry, in which he argues that poetry brings about moral good. Shelley argues that
poetry, expands and exercises the imagination, and imagination is the source of love, compassion
and sympathy. It rests on the ability to project oneself into the position of another person. He
writes,

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself
in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become
his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the
effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by
replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and
assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices
whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the
moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.”
No other English poet of the early 19th century emphasised the association between beauty and
goodness, or believed so passionately in the power of art’s sensual pleasures for the betterment
of society. Keats believed in beauty and aesthetics for their sake, on the contrary, Byron’s pose
was one of immoral sensuousness, or of scandalous rebelliousness. However, Shelley was of the
belief that poetry makes people and society better and his poetry is suffused with this type of
motivated moral optimism, which he hoped would influence his readers spiritually, morally
and sensuously all at the same time.

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Caution Remember that Wordsworth, Blake and Coleridge belong to the older generation
of Romantics whereas Shelley along with Keats and Byron belong to younger generation
of Romantics.

4.4 Ode to the West Wind – Poem

I
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:
O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

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