Percy Byshhe Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind”
Ode to the West Wind
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 odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
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: 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. 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!
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! 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!
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! 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; 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.
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!
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?
When I was in college, I and my roommates loved to make fun of Shelley. His deeply un-self-conscious self-description cracked us up. “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” We were so eager to get on with our lives, so caught up in the need to be self-confident and secure, that Shelley was an embarrassment. And those exclamation points! What could be more, well, ‘uncouth.’ Oh, and we so much wanted to be ‘couth.’
So years passed, decades. I consigned Shelley to the dustbin. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats: I could read them. But although I knew there were riches in Shelley, I never returned.
Recently I had lunch with a friend, and the conversation turned to Shelley. I said I had been running across references to him, so maybe it was time to read him again. “‘Mont Blanc,’” my friend counseled. (It is fine, having reread it.) “‘Ode to the West Wind.’” I replied, recalling what are among the most famous lines in all of poetry, “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” I barely paused. “He never lived in Vermont,” I said, a bit contemptuously.
What did I know, what did I know? Returned home, I read “Mont Blanc,” and “Ode to the West Wind,” and “The Triumph of Life.” Where had I been that I could forget Shelley? Especially, “Ode to the West Wind?”
Yes, it still has that painful self-pitying line about falling on the thorns of life and bleeding. It still has that famous, easily parodied, ending. But the power of the poem, the power of the last quarter of the poem, moves me deeply. Shelley may have been in his twenties when he wrote it, but no one, no one, has ever felt time’s heavy burden more fully, and no one has more poignantly realized that we must resist time’s grinding power. No one.
Let’s plunge into the poem, which is addressed to the West Wind. Shelley is writing in Italy, and the west wind would be coming from the Mediterranean. (In stanza three he refers to the Atlantic Ocean, so Shelley’s native England was also in his thoughts.)
In the course of the poem, the wind will be recalled as a zephyr in summer, but in the poem’s present it is a storm wind, whipping leaves from the trees, forcing the clouds to rearrange themselves as they are hurled against the sky, creating huge waves as it traverses the ocean. It is the destroyer of pleasant security and of life itself. By the close of the poem, it is the force that cannot be withstood, driving life into death – and yet making new life out of the dead world.
Three things as we start the poem. Shelley is directly addressing the West Wind, and the first three first three stanzas implore – no, command – the wind to heed him: “oh hear,” ends each section. Second, the poem is written in terza rima, the stanza form which Dante used in his Divine Comedy. ABA, with the middle rhyme providing the base for the outer rhymes of the following tercet: ABA BCB CDC. Each section has four terza rima stanzas, only to end in a couplet. (“The Triumph of Life,” as my friend Tom has reminded me, is entirely in terza rima, the two poems providing the greatest examples in English of Dante’s prosodic influence.) It should be noted that the four three-line stanzas with the concluding couplet mean that each stanza is a sonnet. Hmmmm. I do not know what to make of that, other than that Shelley is in his own way a marvel of a versifier.
Third, this poem is an ode. What does that mean for readers? What signal does it give us as we encounter the poem? Pardon me for passing the question by for now: I will return to it later, when we see where the poem has gone as it moves forward.
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 odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
As the opening phrase tells us, the west wind is wild. Fierce, uncontrollable, the “breath of Autumn’s being.” It, being but moving air, is itself unseen. Likewise, it issues from the unseen: Who knows where the wind comes from? It blasts the turning leaves, “Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red” from the trees. The season is clearly autumn. The falling leaves seem lifeless, “ghosts,” as the wind tears them from the branches. Autumn? No, that is too literary: Fall. The wind is like a “pestilence,” an omnipresent destructive illness, that has afflicted the trees as their leaves fall to “their dark wintry bed.”
Is Shelley being over-poetic to turn a noun into a verb, “chariotest?” Uncharitably, one would answer yes. Yet the verb works, at least for me: The wind has not ushered but driven the leaves from the branches to the ground. Winter comes.
The next two stanzas are an augury of the conclusion of the poem, although lacking a force we will closely examine later. Here he recognizes that the same wind which destructively de-leaves the trees also sends the seeds – “winged seeds,” which makes me in my New England home think of maple seeds, helicoptering down to the ground, even though I know Shelley is thinking of the trees of Italy or perhaps his native England – to earth. A foretelling of the poem’s ending, but maybe also of Christ, for the dead seeds, “each like a corpse within its grave,” will root and sprout and live again in the spring. In the concluding lines of the poem, though, we will see that Shelley has other things in mind than a Christian rebirth in Christ.
In the spring, he tells us, the fierce autumn West Wind will be supplanted by its “azure sister” to awaken (with a “clarion” call) the frozen earth which, seemingly dead, was actually only “dreaming.” And then that lovely parenthesis, in which the buds on trees are compared via simile to flocks of sheep, feeding not on grass but on the sky, the buds aloft in the air at the ends of branches. The buds then flower and leaf. The leaves, grown green, adorn “with living hues and odours” both the flatland and the hills.
We are not done with the stanza. There is still the couplet. He addresses, as at the start, the west wind directly, here in the final lines a “Wild Spirit” which is everywhere in motion. That wind, as we have seen in the stanza, is both a “destroyer and preserver.” And then the line, which will become a refrain as it returns at the end of the next two stanzas: “Hear, oh hear.” The words are in the imperative, commanding, although they seem to my mind to have a beseeching tone. ‘Hear me, oh wind, for I need you to hear me.’ Why? We will not find out until we reach the end of section four.
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: 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. 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!
Stanza two begins with the wind, metaphorically, become water, a stream. Overhead the clouds are in “commotion” as the wind shreds them, just as it ripped the leaves from the trees in stanza one. Here the trees are metamorphosed into the sky and the sea, and what is shed is not just the shredded clouds, nor the leaves, but the emblems of the storm: “rain and lightning.” Shelley creates an elaborate simile, in which the clouds are like hair, hair of some fierce devotee of the god Dionysus, raging and raving, hair torn in pieces by the wind everywhere, from the horizon to overhead (“zenith”). This wild hair represents “the locks of the approaching storm.”
The west wind is now a “dirge,” the low sound lamenting the leafless trees and “the dying year,” as darkness clamps down on the wintry world. “This closing night / Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,/ Vaulted with all thy congregated might// Of vapours.” Maybe this is over the top, but I love it. This dome is very different from the dome in Shelley’s great elegy for John Keats, “Adonais,” where he wrote: “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.” Not here. The dome here is winter, as I said, clamping down on the world. All that will disrupt the winter’s darkness is “black rain, and fire, and hail” bursting the heavy weight of winter. “Black rain.” A century later, Paul Celan will use a similar phrase in his “Todesfugue,” “black milk.”
Let me pause for a moment to consider what Shelley has been doing in these verses, for it is a major characteristic of the poet. No easy-going language here, for the lines are full of thick and complex imagery. As I thought, quite a lot, about this aspect of Shelley, the descriptor which came to mind was ‘clotted.” His imagery does not, to use a term students love, ‘flow.’ It constantly calls attention to itself, impeding the forward movement of the lines.
At its worst, Shelleyan language represents what Wordsworth, a generation earlier, had tried to get away from, poetic diction. But Shelley wants us to feel the complexity of lived experience. Experience in Wordsworth or William Carlos Williams is powerful often in relation to its directness. (Both poets are also complex, but that is for another time….). But, for Shelley, what we feel is complex and layered, and his language tries to represent this. There is more imagery in Shelley, more of pictures that convey the complex power of what we experience, than in almost any other poet. Maybe this is why the current age moves away from Shelley? Yet I wonder if perhaps he does not remind us, painfully, of how intensely we can feel the complex quality of our lives and experiences?
Returning to the poem, to Section III: Once again, Shelley commands and beseeches, returning to the refrain: “Oh hear!” Why?
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! 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!
Something astonishing happens in this stanza. Shelley recognizes that the wind from the west was also, in summer, a wind of warmth and ease. He punctuates, underlines, the balm of a Mediterranean summer in the middle of the third stanza, with the remarkable phrase, “the sense faints picturing them!” No one but Shelley could have written this line. It makes us embarrassed, doesn’t it, this hyper-sensitivity in which the senses cannot bear to think of, experience, the pleasures of summer, pleasures his friend John Keats was thinking of when he wrote in his “Ode on Indolence,” “sweet as drowsy noons/And evenings steep’d in honey’d indolence.” That hyper-sensitivity was formerly abjured. Alexander Pope was glad we were as we are, not overly sensitive, or we might “die of a rose in aromatic pain as he wrote in section VI his “Essay on Man.” Pope did not know a future generation would bring forward Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Imagery abounds in this stanza (the allusion to “Baiae’s bay” indicates he is describing the Bay of Naples) as Shelley portrays the pleasures and intensity of a lovely summer day, “overgrown with azure moss and flowers.” Yet “the sense faints picturing them!” As I wrote earlier, Shelley can be embarrassing. Hyper-sensitive. Over the top . . . . We, of course, know otherwise. We have outgrown Shelley. We have to make breakfast, wash the dishes, go off to work. Yet here is Shelley fainting as he recalls the loveliness of summer. Shelley is such a feeling spirit: Oh, give us a break.
But Shelley is larger than we might think. Notice how the stanza takes a turn after that phrase. Yes, Shelley acknowledges the warm western breezes which surround summer. But suddenly the west wind is a storm wind, cleaving the ocean itself in to “chasms” as huge waves are caused by, and an index to, the power of the wind in autumn. Even the seaweed far below the surface, “the sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear/ The sapless foliage of the ocean” can feel the wind far above. Even deep below the surface the oceanic forests of the sea “know/ Thy voice.”
I find it remarkable that within the six lines following that fainting with summer delight we are, with Shelley and the entire ocean, “suddenly grow[n] grey with fear/ And tremble and despoil themselves.” The entire world, it seems, quakes before the destructive power of that west wind. Where else in poetry can we find such a remarkable turning of subject and mood? From unbearable delight to a wrecking force?
“Despoil.” We are ravaged, plundered, just as the seaweed far below the gigantic waves is ravaged. The west wind has not only ripped the leaves from the trees, scattered the fleecy clouds of summer. It has ravaged us as it blows through the fall of the year. Winter, death, destruction, have all come with that “wild West Wind.”
And still, the poet implores, now for the third time: “Oh hear!” What, we ask, does he want the wind to hear? Now the poem takes off, as he begins to provide the reason for his imploring.
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! 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; 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 stanza begins with three subjunctive phrases, three statements contrary to actual fact. “If.” ‘If I were a dead leaf ripped from its tree, if I were a cloud torn by the savage wind, if I were a wave propelled by the wind’s force,’ he says, reprising what he has already shown us in the poem. The wind that moves leaves and clouds and waves is controlling but itself “uncontrollable.” Then he turns to a fourth subjunctive, ‘If only I were as I was once, when I was younger, and I too could blast through the world with force and uncontrolled power.’ Again, a Shelleyan adjective, for who else ever used the noun as an adjective: “skiey?” (Although once he used it, others would, too.) The speed he refers to is not of the sky itself, which we can presume is motionless, but of the clouds moved by the west wind through the sky.
His is the great Romantic complaint. The complaint is strongest, in the English tradition, in Wordsworth. Wordsworth questions, in his “Intimations Ode” [1807], “Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Youth is behind us, and we are mired in everyday life, in what Wallace Stevens aptly called “the malady of the quotidian.”
Shelley wants so very fervently not to be encumbered by the burden of daily living and the “heavy weight” of all he has experienced, wants to leave behind all that experience has taught him about bending towards the reality principle. Wordsworth had preceded him – “Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,/ And custom lie upon thee with a weight,/ Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!” – in this deep understanding that what we learn from living is not a liberation but a burden.
But Wordsworth, even at his most powerful, lacks the painfulness of Shelley’s beseeching:
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.
About the final quatrain: Despite the thorns and the bleeding, I don’t think Shelley can be beat. He wants the savage west wind to lift him up, carry him away. “Be thou me, impetuous one!” he will simultaneously demand and implore in the succeeding stanza.
The ‘clottedness’ has disappeared. Shelley wants to escape being “chain’d and bow’d’” and to return to a time of youth when he, too, was “tameless, swift, and proud.” We might cringe at the self-pity of “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” even though I would wager we all feel this way, at numerous times, but Shelley’s desire to shed the heavy burden of life to enable him to return to a state in which the world was all promise, in which he looked with pride at his possibilities and not his limitations, is thrilling.
(Is this image of youth, as free and full of possibility, a male fantasy, to which women, subject so often to limitations from the very first years of their existence, do not respond deeply? I don’t know. What I do know is there is in many a powerful hunger for liberation that Shelley proclaims, the power to be the “uncontrollable” force of one’s own life.)
What transpires in this stanza is that Shelley is answering the question we have had before us throughout the first three stanzas: Why is he imploring the West Wind to “hear” him? He wants the spirit of the wind, that drives fiercely through the world, to be his spirit once again. So, despite the reality – he is not a leaf, a cloud, a wave, a boy – he wants what some of these things have: to be moved by the fierce west wind. He wants no longer to be weighed down by the hours, he desires no longer to be “chain’d,” he seeks no longer to be “bow’d.”
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!
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 now turns to a favorite Romantic trope, the Aeolian harp. An Aeolian harp is a strange musical instrument whose strings are not plucked by fingers but set to vibrating by the wind. It is an image for those who desire to be ‘played by the world, the world of natural things.’ At once it suggests both the relation of our minds and creativity to nature, and the force of an ‘imagination’ deep within us which can course through us and propel us into speech. This speech from our internal wind, the “divine afflatus’ as Whitman called it, is speech which is not controlled by rational thought and conscious deliberation.
Shelley wants to be a lyre, played by the “wild West Wind.” He knows that the immediate result of the wind is to rip the dying leaves from the trees, and recognizes a consonance with his own life (now a tree, now a book – for the leaves of a book are important to this voice which wants to be a poet) where his leaves fall, as mortality and the thought of death show their destructive force. Sad that we must die, but “sweet” as well, for there is a music – “a deep autumnal tone” – that surrounds us in our awareness of mortality. “I have been half in love with easeful death,” Keats wrote memorably in his “Ode to a Nightingale.”
But Shelley does not linger long with the sweetness. He is no Keats. “Be thou, Spirit fierce,/ My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” He is writing in the imperative mood: We have no need of the exclamation marks to let us know this. He is not beseeching now, but commanding. “Drive my dead thought…Scatter [my words]…among mankind, Be…the trumpet of a prophecy!” Ah, he is commanding. No more death for him, no more fallen and “pestilence-stricken” words.
Shelley, before our eyes, is rising from the despair which marked the earlier part of the poem. He is resuming the active self. Whitman, thirty years later, will do the same thing: Passive for too long, he says in section 38 of “Song of Myself,” “I resume the overstaid fraction.” That Whitman abandons his passivity, his sense of despair, in his own extraordinary terms should not blind us to what Shelley is doing here. Here is Whitman, earlier in that section, in what is surely one of the most stunning passages in all of poetry:
Enough! enough! enough!
Somehow I have been stunn’d. Stand back!
Give me a little time beyond my cuff’d heat, slumbers, dreams, gaping,
I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake.
Shelley too understands that, although he has lost much, his vital energy can be regained. It is hard not to love Shelley’s words – although we can be embarrassed by the words as well, for we all want to be so very adult and mature – “Be thou, Spirit fierce,/ My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!”
Let me return to something I mentioned earlier. We need to inquire why is this poem is called “Ode to the West Wind?” How is it an ode? It is so different from Wordsworth’s “Intimations Ode” or Keats’s great odes. There is no complex lineation here, no traditional strophe/antistrophe/epode. The language is elevated, as in an ode, for although at times we can read the language as regressively ‘poetic,’ we can also see that Shelley in addressing the West Wind has recourse to the elevated language we associate with odes.
Most specifically, and this is why I have reserved this discussion of its genre to this point, Shelley is invoking a natural phenomenon and addressing it directly. Why? We have already seen why. He has suffered the destructiveness he associates with the west wind, the sickness which infects his spirit; here, he invokes the wind’s power to push towards death and beyond. The west wind is indeed the “trumpet of a prophecy!” Yes, it ushers in winter, but after winter (oh, this is trite) comes spring. But Shelley, in the power of his desire to incorporate the west wind, or to be driven by it, turns at the end of the poem to that famous question. From description to the imperative to question. “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
I have always thought the question is rhetorical. Of course, the poet is telling us, spring follows after winter. But what if it is a real, an actual question? What if spring does not automatically follow after winter? Shelley is asking the agency he sees in the wind to become his, for winter and death to turn into spring and rebirth. He desires that he, through an inner power of will, can “scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth/ Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!”
I try not to be too academic in these letters about poetry. But here it is needful to refer to a famous essay of Shelley’s, “A Defense of Poetry” [1821. The poem we are discussing dates from 1819.] It is a remarkable work, hard to read (I have recently gone back to it), a bit inchoate, full of ideas which I find both incisive and appallingly idealistic. But only if we go to the essay can we get a sense of just how revolutionary these final lines are.
In his “Defense,” Shelley sees the first humans as poets, using the imagination to turn things into words: “Poetry is connate with the origin of man.” In early times, humans create language, and “their language is vitally metaphorical…. In the infancy of society, every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry.”
Shelley says poetry must always be accompanied by pleasure, and that “poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as they were not familiar.” Yes, I say, but then find what Shelley thinks we discover is the form of things. He is a Platonist, and I am not. Still, he claims for poetry that “the great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” A quaint idea, today, but I like Shelley believe it – although with more uncertainty and reservations than he.
Two-thirds of the way through the essay, he considers this: “It is admitted that the exercise of the imagination is most delightful, but it is alleged that that of reason is more useful.” We know this argument well. Poetry, the arts, the humanities, are kind of pleasant; but we need to study and concentrate on useful things, like computer engineering, brain science, business methods. Universities today, and society itself, are rife with this argument.
I said Shelley was an idealist. Of course he is. He will argue that poetry is more useful than science and the exercise of reason. It seems hard to swallow, but Shelley makes an extraordinary case. We can imagine the world, he says, without “Lock, Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, all guides to the proper exercise of reason. Without them, he notes not without sarcastic irony, “a little more nonsense would have been talked for a century or two; and perhaps a few more men, women and children burnt as heretics.” But then he states,
But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.…The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of the grosser sciences.
Pretty heavy, though a great defense of the arts! I myself believe what he is saying, but will leave to you, the reader, to make a determination for yourself.
I fear I have been going on overlong about Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry.” I have had a purpose.
The image of himself that Shelley presents in the final stanza of “Ode to the West Wind” proposes a remarkable role for the poet. Nowhere is this role more forthrightly stated that in the famous conclusion to his “Defense of Poetry.”. [A hierophant is someone who ushers people toward what is holy.]
Poets are the hierophants of an apprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which moves not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
Does this sound familiar? James Joyce read Shelley, and the nineteenth century poet’s words haunt Stephen Daedalus’s final words in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. “Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” That forging in his soul of the uncreated conscience of his race? Pure Shelley.
So let’s go back to the concluding section of “Ode to the West Wind.” It began with the image of the Aeolian harp (a metaphor Shelley employs in the “Defense,” although there he says the individual resonates with the wind-powered sound, making a “harmony” which merges inner and outer worlds into ‘poetry.’) We recall his wonderful imperative in the poem, “Be thou, Spirit fierce,/ My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” He demands – not implores – that the wind become his spirit, that his “dead thoughts” come alive, “quicken to a new birth!”
It is not just Spring, the season, he is writing about. It is his vision of the poet in the world, of the power of poetry.
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!
The poet’s words will be sparks – from a spirit that has never been extinguished, even if it was damped down by the heavy weight of suffering and experience – that will find not just a hearing, but a responsive kindling, among the hearts of the world. Likely, the image Shelley has at the back of his mind is that of the Phoenix, the mythical bird that arises from the ashes of his predecessor’s demise.
The poet will be a prophet to an as-yet “unawaken’d earth.” Trumpets will sound from the words of the poet. The world will rise again, as the phoenix does from the ashes of its past. And the new rise of the world? It will be the poet who sets that in motion, who kindles the new fires that reshape the world.
This is a clarion call, a call to the West Wind to bring renewal, not just of the poet, but the whole world of men and women. “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” It is a social revolution, not just the changing of the seasons, that informs Shelley’s query at the end of the poem.
Thus, it is not just ‘spring’ that Shelley is referring to, but the rebirth of the entire world, a world of men and women and institutions and laws. When he asks, and he really does ask, “can Spring be far behind?” he is inquiring if poetry, through him, can revitalize and reshape the world.
Shelley calls for a renewal, in himself, of that spirit and vision that will ultimately, through words, remake the world. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This “Ode” is a cry, from the poet to the wind but ultimately to himself, to begin the task of making the future world.
This is far from the self-pitying poet of the previous stanza, fallen on the thorns of life and bleeding. The poet, buoyed by the great force of the West Wind, will be a “trumpet of prophecy.” He will awaken what has been dormant, the beaten-down spirit, and in those gorgeous words of the conclusion of the “Defense,” “mirror… the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.” The poet will feel the future, and that it has been shaped by what is currently the present. Sounding his trumpet across the world, he will rekindle the “unawaken’d earth” to his revolutionary call.
It is so easy to feel superior to Shelley, to belittle him because we feel we know so much better. But in “Ode to the West Wind” we hear not only his complaints, but his devotion to a role for the poet that is perhaps unparalleled in western civilization since the prophets of Biblical times.