A Summary and Analysis of Percy Shelley’s ‘Ode

to the West Wind’

‘Ode to the West Wind’ is one of the best-known and best-loved poems by Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792-1822). It is a quintessential Romantic poem. But what does it mean? Its
closing words are well-known and often quoted, but how does the rest of the poem build
towards them? ing ad

The best way to go about offering an analysis of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is to go through
the poem and provide a part-by-part summary, pointing out some of the most important
features of Shelley’s poem. So, here goes…

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:

Shelley begins ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by addressing this wind which blows away the
falling autumn leaves as they drop from the trees. The leaves are various colours,
including yellow, black, and red. It’s as if the leaves have been infected with a pestilence
or plague, that makes them drop en masse.

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 odours plain and hill:

Shelley continues by describing how the west wind transports (like a charioteer driving
somebody) the seeds from the flowers, taking them to their ‘wintry bed’.

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
Shelley concludes this opening section by calling the west wind a ‘Wild Spirit’ (recalling,
perhaps, that the word spirit is derived from the Latin meaning ‘breath’, suggesting the
wind) and branding it both a ‘destroyer’ and a ‘preserver’: a destroyer because it helps to
bring the leaves down from the trees, but a preserver because it helps to disseminate the
seeds from the plants and trees, ensuring they are find their way to the ground so they will
grow in the spring.

II

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,

Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning:

Shelley continues to address the west wind in this second section, saying that the wind
bears the clouds along, much as it moves the ‘decaying leaves’ from the trees; as if to
spell out this link, Shelley speaks of the ‘tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean’,
suggesting that the skies and the seas have ‘boughs’ like a tree. It’s as if all of nature is
borne along by the west wind.

there are spread

On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm.

Now Shelley talks about the clouds borne by the west wind as being like locks of har on
the head of ‘some fierce Maenad’: the Maenads were a group of women who followed the
god Dionysus in classical myth. They are sometimes known as the Bacchae (as in a
famous play by Euripides), after Bacchus, the Latin name for the Greek Dionysus.

The Maenads’ name literally translates as ‘raving ones’ because they would drink and
dance in a frenzy. The simile draws attention to the raging, wild nature of the west wind,
which heralds the approach of the wild storm.

Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

Shelley concludes this second section by likening the sound of the west wind to a funeral
song or ‘dirge’, mourning the death of the year (as it’s autumn and the leaves are falling).
The night sky will be like the dome of a large burial ground or sepulchre, with all of the
vapours from the clouds forming the vaulting (ceiling). Shelley considers the powerful
rain, hail, and fire (lightning) that will ‘burst’ from these vapours when the storm erupts.

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!

Shelley says that the west wind wakened the Mediterranean sea from its summery
slumbers. A dreamy evocation of the Mediterranean, including an isle of pumice rock in
‘Baiae’s bay’ (Baiae was an ancient Roman town on the northwest shore of the Gulf of
Naples), and ‘old palaces and towers’ overgrown with blue moss and sweet flowers.

Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!

Once again, Shelley brings the attention back to the sound of the west wind as it heralds
the coming of the storm. The power of the west wind is also suggested through the idea
that the Atlantic ocean, possessed of ‘level powers’, creates ‘chasms’ and gaps for the
wind to echo within.

IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable!

Shelley begins the fourth section of his ode to the west wind by thinking about how
wonderful it would be to be free among nature, and to be borne along by the sheer power
and motion of the west wind, much like one of those leaves, or clouds, or ocean waves.
Shelley would be completely free; the only thing that would be freer is the
‘uncontrollable’ west wind itself.

If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seem’d a vision;

As is common in Romanticism, Shelley thinks back to his childhood, when the world
seemed full of freedom and boundless possibility, and it almost seemed possible that
Shelley could outrun the wild west wind itself.

I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d

One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

This is where things get a little harder to pick apart and analyse. What does Shelley mean
by ‘I would ne’er have striven / As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need’? Shelley is
saying that if he could recapture that boyhood freedom, he would never have to pray to
the west wind in times of need. He would be free already.

As things stand, he can only pray to the west wind to lift him as it does a wave, a leaf,
and a cloud. He is not flying up: he is falling, and falling ‘upon the thorns of life’. In
other words, he is suffering, in pain, tormented. Shelley is, of course, using the idea of
falling on the thorns of life as a metaphor for his emotional and psychological torment.

V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Shelley entreats the west wind to play him, as a man would play a lyre (a string
instrument not dissimilar to a harp, and the origin, incidentally, of the word lyric to
describe lyric poetry and song lyrics: there’s something slightly ‘meta’ about a nature
poet asking nature to play him like an instrument).

Shelley points out that the forest is already being played like a lyre, since the west wind
makes a pleasing musical sound as it moves through the trees. Shelley likens himself to
the forest in that his ‘leaves are falling’: he is withering away, but also growing older
(mind you, he was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote ‘Ode to the West Wind’!).

We then get a delicious oxymoron, when Shelley refers to the ‘tumult of [the wind’s]
harmonies’. ‘Harmonious tumult’ is somewhat paradoxical, but not for Shelley, who
welcomes the way the wind wildly shakes everything up. There’s a political subtext here:
Shelley was calling for revolution in 1819, as his poem ‘England in 1819’ suggested.

Both Shelley and the forest will sing sweetly, though ‘in sadness’ (the forest because it’s
losing its leaves, and Shelley because he is losing hope). Shelley calls upon the west wind
to be his ‘Spirit’, to make them both as one: wild, impetuous, undaunted.

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Shelley concludes ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by entreating the wind to scatter the poet’s
‘dead thoughts’ (ideas he’s abandoned) across the universe. Much as scattering of the
withered dead leaves allows the seeds of next year’s trees to take root and grow, so
Shelley believes it is only by having his old ideas blown away that he can dream of new
ones, and with it, a new world, ‘a new birth’.
Shelley sees his poem as a religious incantation or chant, which will magically make the
wind scatter his thoughts like leaves – or, indeed, like ashes and sparks in a fireplace. The
ashes may be dead and burnt, but by moving they often burst into new life, and new
sparks emerge from the ashes. (One wonders whether Gerard Manley Hopkins was
recalling ‘Ode to the West Wind’ when he wrote the closing lines of his poem ‘The
Windhover’.)

In the closing lines of the poem, Shelley tells the wind to be like a trumpet announcing a
prophecy, blowing through the poet’s lips to make a sound and alert the sleeping world to
Shelley’s message of reform.

In the famous closing words of the poem, ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’,
Shelley returns to the earlier imagery of the poem involving the west wind scattering the
dead leaves to pave the way for the new trees next spring; the poem ends on a resounding
note of hope for what the future could bring – for Shelley, nature, and for the political
world.

‘Ode to the West Wind’ was written in 1819 during a turbulent time in English history:
the Peterloo Massacre on 16 August 1819, which Shelley also wrote about in his poem
‘The Mask of Anarchy’, deeply affected the poet.

But the poem is personal as well as political: the west wind is the wind that would carry
Shelley back from Florence (where he was living at the time) to England, where he
wanted to help fight for reform and revolution.

Personal and political are thus closely linked in ‘Ode to the West Wind’, which constantly
draws attention to the aural potential of the wind: it cannot be seen (though its effects
certainly can), but it can be heard, much as the poet’s words could be word, announcing
and calling for political reform.