Ode to the West Wind as a Romantic Poem
The genius of Percy Bysshe Shelley mainly
rests upon as a lyric poet per excellence. Without any hesitation we may
acknowledge him to be the loftiest and most spontaneous singer in the whole
range of English literature. His entire personality is dissolved into his songs,
so much so that he becomes “a voice, a lyric incarnate.”
Swinburne truly regards him “the perfect singing God.”
The Ode to
the West Wind abounds in lyricism. S. A. Brooke puts it “the lyric of lyrics.”
Percy Shelley was, and is, one of the
poets who represented the Romantics beautifully – he was a passionate, wild
soul, who blended an admiration for natural beauty with incisive political
observations. Romanticism is characterised by a deep appreciation of
nature, emphasis on emotion over rationality, close examination of the human
condition, and the prioritisation of the writer’s creative spirit over literary
and formal conventions. Shelley was the most gifted with emotional fervour. His
emotional outbursts sound loud in plenty of expression in Ode to the West Wind:
“oh,
lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud,” “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,”
“Be thou spirit fierce, / My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!” Those
fiery emotion burns to white heat.
The
poem Ode to the West Wind was written in the autumn of 1819, in the
beautiful Cascine Gardens outside Florence and was published with Prometheus
Unbound in 1820. Shelley wrote this ode shortly after the Peterloo Massacre,
in which royal soldiers attacked and killed working class protestors at a rally
in the St. Peter’s Field area of Manchester. Together with other works written
in 1819, such as ‘England in 1819’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ did much to generate
Shelley’s reputation as radical thinker. The poet is
himself in a mood of despondency and misery.
Shelley’s
lyrics are surpassingly musical and sweet. Swinburne was ecstatic in his
tribute to this aspect of Shelley’s lyricism. The co-existence of pessimism and
optimism- the swift replacement of one by the other-is a major attractive
feature of Shelley’s lyric poetry. He was alone the perfect singing God; his
thoughts words and deeds all sang together. Arnold, one of the worst critics of
Shelley, admired his music and remarked: “the
right sphere of Shelley’s genius was the sphere of music.” Shelley’s
careful handling of diction fitting into the sense of his lines enhances the
musical quality keeping with the swift, of his lyrics. The rhythm of Ode to the
West Wind is thus exactly in gusty march of the wind itself: “O wild West Wind, thou breathe of Autumn’s
being.” Shelley never allows morbidity to overcome the enjoyment in his
lyrics. Self-pity is no doubt his favourite theme, but in his lyrics, he
presents this self-pity, not as something to be feared, but as an essential
part of life. His
despondency is soon replaced by an ecstatic rapture of joy when he comes to
think of the future happiness of mankind, of the millennium to come:
“If
Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
Shelley
calls the West Wind a destroyer and a preserver at the same time. It is a
destroyer because it makes the trees shed their leaves making them bare. The
west wind is called a preserver since it carries the seeds to places where they
lie in hibernation during the winter and when the sister of west wind, the east
wind blows in spring time, they start to germinate and blossom into many
different
 |
| "the leaves dead are driven..." |
coloured flowers. Winter is often seen as death since plants die and
many animals hide themselves for the season. The earth looks barren and appears
lifeless but spring is a time of rejuvenation, flowers blossom and insects and
animals begin to start life again. The poet gives the credit of carrying the
seeds to a safer place in winter to the west wind. This way it becomes the
destroyer and the preserver.
Like
the other Romantic poets, Shelley too was an ardent lover of Nature. Like
Wordsworth, Shelley conceives of Nature as one spirit, the Supreme Power. He
celebrates nature in most of his poems as his main theme such as The Cloud, To a Skylark, and To
the Moon, Ode to the West Wind, A
Dream of the Unknown. The tone of pessimism set in the beginning with
‘dead’,’ghosts’,’corpse in grave’ reaches its climax with ‘ I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed’. Shelley is a great
prophet- a dreamer who conjures up vision of a millennium for mankind. Shelley
is pessimistic about the present but optimistic about the future. He believes
that regeneration always follows destruction and that a new and Utopian order
is certain to come when the present degenerate system is ended.
Idealism is
a part and parcel of Shelley’s temperament. He is a rebel, like Byron, against
the age –old customs, traditions, conventions and institutions, sanctioned only
by practice and not by reason. Unlike Byron, but, he is not only a rebel but
also a reformer. He wants to reconstitute society in keeping with his ideals of
good, truth and beauty. According to Compton- Rickett, “To renovate the world, to bring about utopia, is his constant aim, and
for this reason we may regard Shelley as emphatically the poet of eager,
sensitive youth; not the animal youth of Byron, but the spiritual youth of the
visionary and reformer.”
Poetry is
the expression of the poet’s mind. This is absolutely true of Shelley’s poetry.
A study of Shelley’s poetry is the easiest and shortest way to his mind and
personality. In
the West Wind, Shelley finds a kindred spirit. The poet narrates the change, he has
undergone in the course of his life. He was full of energy, enthusiasm and
speed in his boyhood, but the agonies and bitterness of life-“A heavy weight of hours”-has
repressed his qualities and has put him in an unbearable state. He had lost his old vigour and force. The
expression of his sufferings “I fall
upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”is intensely genuine, heart-rending, and
possibly the most spontaneous of Shelley’s emotional outbursts through his
poems.
Shelley
holds a unique place in English literature by virtue of his power of making
myths out of the objects and forces of Nature. Shelley’s
sky-lyrics- Ode to the West Wind,
The Cloud and To A Skylark -have all been
interpreted as having symbolic significance. The West Wind drives away the old,
pale; hectic-red leaves and scatters fresh seeds over the ground. Shelley thus
looks upon the Wind as a destroyer of the old order and the usherer of a new
one i.e., as a symbol of the forces that will end all evil and bring about the
golden millennium. The Wind
also symbolizes Shelley’s own personality.
The poem
closes on a message of hope. Turmoil is balanced against calm, life against
death, detail against generalization, cold against calm, reconstruction against
destruction, plain against hill, and so on. Like a true prophet Shelley dreams
and makes us dream:
“If winter
comes, can spring be far behind”
