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

Lines 69–70 Notes
Shelley initially framed the last two lines as a statement, expressed as a question and the poem
ends on a note of suspense rather than affirmation. The speaker has made his case and plea to
help the wind in the announcement of a new age. However, he has not received an answer yet.
Together with his audience, the speaker eagerly awaits a “yes”, delivered on the wings of the
wind.

4.7 Form

All of the seven parts of Ode to the West Wind have five stanzas comprising of 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 used 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 used as the rhyme for the first and third
lines in the next stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of the last three-line
stanza. Hence, all of the seven parts of Ode to the West Wind follows the scheme ABA BCB CDC
DED EE.

Task Find out terza rima and examples where this rhyme scheme is popularly used.

4.8 Commentary

The slight, smooth terza rima of Ode to the West Wind finds Shelley taking a long thematic leap
beyond the scope of Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and combining his own art into the natural world
and to his meditation on beauty. Shelley summons the wind miraculously, explaining its power
and its role as both “destroyer and preserver,” he asks the wind to sweep him out of his lethargy
“as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”
In the fifth section, the poet then takes an extraordinary turn, transforming the wind into a
metaphor for his own art, the communicative capacity that drives “dead thoughts” like “withered
leaves” over the universe, to “quicken a new birth” or the coming of the spring. Here the spring
season is a metaphor for human morality, liberty, imagination or consciousness, which Shelley
hoped his art could bring in the human mind.
Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical
spirit and his poetic faculty. Now, it will play him like a musical instrument like the way it
strums the leaves of the trees. The younger generation largely viewed nature as a source of
beauty and aesthetic experience whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature
as a source of truth and authentic experience. In this poem, Shelley clearly links nature with art
by finding strong natural metaphors to express his ideas about power, quality, and other effects
of aesthetic expression.

4.9 Critical Analysis

Ode to the West Wind is Shelley’s outstanding work in which he wishes to summon the spirit in
the wind and not the just the wind only. Therefore, he regards the wind as a human being, who
has a strange power to frighten the dead leaves, as the poet sees them, and to protect the winged

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