Ode to the West Wind
Ode to the West Wind Lyrics
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 wingèd 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, O 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,
On the blue surface of thine airy 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: O hear!
III.
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled 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
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O 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 seemed 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 chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
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 withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
About
Author: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), one of the ‘Big Six’ Romantic poets, the others being Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.
Date: Written in 1819, near Florence, Italy. Published in 1820.
Romantic Poetry
A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature. The use of the word ‘wild’ evokes the supernatural 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 poem is an ‘ode’ which means song in Greek. By Shelley’s time an ode meant a short poem in a complicated verse form, often addressing an abstract aspect of Nature.
The west wind is the prevailing one for much of the year in Western Europe, usually mild except for autumn when it can be violent.
Form and Structure: Five sonnets in one! All in terza rima. Each canto consists of four tercets (ABA, BCB, CDC, DED) and a rhyming couplet (EE); effectively sonnet structure. The ode is written in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is likely an homage to Dante, who made this pattern famous in his Commedia.
There is an interesting progression. The first three sections are prayer-like, invoking the West Wind much as one addresses a deity and enumerates its characteristics. The poet moves on in Part IV to his own spiritual needs and disillusionment. Finally it ends with an ambiguous question, more in doubt than certainty.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
In the footnotes to Ode to the West Wind, Shelley writes;
This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.
The phenomenon alluded to at the conclusion of the third stanza is well known to naturalists. The vegetation at the bottom of the sea, of rivers, and of lakes, sympathises with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it.
- 3.To Harriet
- 6.Mutability
- 7.On Death
- 11.The Sunset
- 13.Fragment: Home
- 14.Marianne’s Dream
- 16.Stanzas 1 And 2
- 17.To Constantia
- 21.‘Mighty Eagle’
- 25.On Fanny Godwin
- 27.Death
- 28.Otho
- 36.A Hate-Song
- 38.Ozymandias
- 39.To The Nile
- 41.The Past
- 42.To Mary —
- 57.Song For ‘Tasso’
- 61.Marenghi
- 72.National Anthem
- 74.Cancelled Stanza
- 76.An Exhortation
- 82.To Mary Shelley
- 100.The Cloud
- 101.To A Skylark
- 102.Ode To Liberty
- 103.Arethusa
- 105.Hymn Of Apollo
- 106.Hymn Of Pan
- 107.The Question
- 108.Autumn: A Dirge
- 109.The Waning Moon
- 110.To The Moon
- 111.Liberty
- 112.Summer And Winter
- 113.The Tower Of Famine
- 114.An Allegory
- 116.Lines To A Reviewer
- 118.Good-Night
- 119.Buona Notte
- 120.Orpheus
- 121.Fiordispina
- 122.Time Long Past
- 133.Dirge For The Year
- 135.Time
- 137.To Emilia Viviani
- 138.The Fugitives
- 139.Song
- 143.The Aziola
- 144.A Lament
- 145.Remembrance
- 146.To Edward Williams
- 147.Epithalamium
- 151.Ginevra
- 154.Music
- 155.Sonnet To Byron
- 156.Fragment On Keats
- 158.To-Morrow
- 159.Fragment: A Wanderer
- 164.Fragment: Rain
- 175.The Zucca
- 185.The Isle
- 187.Epitaph
- Ode to the West Wind
