Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), one of the ‘Big Six’ Romantic poets, the others being Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

Romantic Poetry
A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. This was a subject of particular interest to the poet Wordsworth. Shelley, however, was concerned with regeneration of his spiritual and poetic self, and regeneration of Europe politically. It was a turbulent time when the Napoleonic Wars had not long ended and Europe was in a state of flux and unrest. In England the infamous Peterloo Massacre had occurred in August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd demonstrating against poor economic conditions and lack of parliamentary representation in the north of England.

The Power of Nature — Shelley was a Pantheist and believed that Nature or a divine spirit of beauty, runs through everything in the universe. This force can be the root of human joy and goodness and can influence people to change the world for the better, though he is also aware of its indiscriminately destructive side.

The Poem
The subject is, quite simply, the sadness of autumn and winter and human yearning for spring, a dirge being a sad song or lament. The natural world has this same yearning, with some creatures migrating and some hibernating. The winter season — ‘dead cold Year — is likened to death.

Structure
The poem comprises two stanzas of eleven lines each, with an extraordinarily clever complex rhyme scheme. The pattern in both stanzas is AABCADDDBBB. Shelley uses assonant and consonant rhyme. In line four of both stanzas there is internal rhyme — ‘bed’ and ‘dead’; ‘flown’ and ‘gone’.

Lines are of uneven length, with the 3rd, 5th and 9th lines shorter, and 4th and 11th long. The flow and rhythm are so natural that the reader hardly notices the complexity.

Language
Shelley’s most notable characteristic is his use of abstract words like ‘Death, 'Noon’, ‘Day’. Here he capitalises two words only; ‘Months’ and ‘Year’, because of their importance to the meaning of the poem. References to the cosmos — ‘thunder’, ‘wind’ and ‘sun’ — are key to this and most of his poetry.