The Full Text of “Ode to the West Wind”
I
1O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
2Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
3Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
4Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
5Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
6Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
7The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
8Each like a corpse within its grave, until
9Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
10Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
11(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
12With living hues and odours plain and hill:
13Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
14Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
II
15Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
16Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
17Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
18Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
19On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
20Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
21Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
22Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
23The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
24Of the dying year, to which this closing night
25Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
26Vaulted with all thy congregated might
27Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
28Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!
III
29Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
30The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
31Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,
32Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
33And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
34Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
35All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
36So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
37For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
38Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
39The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
40The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
41Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
42And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!
IV
43If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
44If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
45A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
46The impulse of thy strength, only less free
47Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
48I were as in my boyhood, and could be
49The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
50As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
51Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven
52As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
53Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
54I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
55A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd
56One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
57Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
58What if my leaves are falling like its own!
59The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
60Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
61Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
62My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
63Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
64Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
65And, by the incantation of this verse,
66Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
67Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
68Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
69The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
70If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
The Full Text of “Ode to the West Wind”
I
1O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
2Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
3Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
4Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
5Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
6Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
7The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
8Each like a corpse within its grave, until
9Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
10Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
11(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
12With living hues and odours plain and hill:
13Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
14Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
II
15Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
16Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
17Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
18Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
19On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
20Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
21Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
22Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
23The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
24Of the dying year, to which this closing night
25Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
26Vaulted with all thy congregated might
27Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
28Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!
III
29Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
30The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
31Lull'd by the coil of his crystalline streams,
32Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
33And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
34Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
35All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
36So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
37For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
38Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
39The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
40The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
41Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
42And tremble and despoil themselves: oh hear!
IV
43If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
44If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
45A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
46The impulse of thy strength, only less free
47Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
48I were as in my boyhood, and could be
49The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
50As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
51Scarce seem'd a vision; I would ne'er have striven
52As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
53Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
54I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
55A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd
56One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
V
57Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
58What if my leaves are falling like its own!
59The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
60Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
61Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
62My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
63Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
64Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!
65And, by the incantation of this verse,
66Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
67Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
68Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
69The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
70If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
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“Ode to the West Wind” Introduction
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“Ode to the West Wind” is a poem written by the English Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. According to Shelley, the poem was written in the woods outside Florence, Italy in the autumn of 1819. In the poem, the speaker directly addresses the west wind. The speaker treats the west wind as a force of death and decay, and welcomes this death and decay because it means that rejuvenation and rebirth will come soon. In the final two sections of the poem, the speaker suggests that he wants to help promote this rebirth through his own poetry—and that rejuvenation he hopes to see is both political and poetic: a rebirth of society and its ways of writing.
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“Ode to the West Wind” Summary
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1.
You, the unruly west wind, are the essence of the Fall. You are invisible, but you scatter the fallen leaves: they look like ghosts running away from a witch or wizard. The leaves are yellow and black, white and wild red. They look like crowds of sick people. You carry the seeds, as if you're their chariot, down to the earth where they'll sleep all winter. They lie there, cold and humble, like dead bodies in their graves, until your blue sister, the Spring wind, blows her trumpet and wakes up the earth. Then she brings out the buds. They are like flocks of sheep; they feed in the open air. And she fills the meadows and the hills with sweet smells and beautiful colors. Unruly west wind, moving everywhere: you are both an exterminator and a savior. Please listen to me!
2.
In the high and whirling reaches of the sky, you send the clouds twirling: they look like dead leaves, shaken loose from the branches of the heavens and the sea. They are like angels, full of rain and lightning. Or they are scattered across the blue sky, like the blond hair of a wildly dancing girl who is a follower of Dionysus. The clouds stretch from the horizon to the top of the sky like the hair of the coming storm. West wind, you sad song of the end of the year. The night sky will be like the dome of a vast tomb, the clouds you gathered like archways running across it. And from the solid top of that tomb, dark rain, lightning, and hail will fall down. Listen to me!
3.
You woke the Mediterranean from its summer dreams. That blue sea, which lay wrapped in its crystal-clear currents, was snoozing near an island made of volcanic rock in the Bay of Baiae, near Naples. In the waters of the bay you saw the ruins of old palaces and towers, now submerged in the water's thicker form of daylight. These ruins were overgrown with sea plants that looked like blue moss and flowers. They are so beautiful that I faint when I think of them. You—whose path turns the smooth surface of the Atlantic Ocean into tall waves, while deep below the surface sea-flowers and forests of seaweed, which have leaves with no sap, hear your voice and turn gray from fear, trembling, losing their flowers and leaves—listen to me, wind!
4.
If only I was a dead leaf, you might carry me. You might let me fly with you if I was a cloud. Or if I was a wave that you drive forward, I would share your strength—though I’d be less free than you, since no one can control you. If only I could be the way I was when I was a child, when I was your friend, wandering with you across the sky—then it didn’t seem crazy to imagine that I could be as fast as you are—then I wouldn’t have called out to you, prayed to you, in desperation. Please lift me up like a wave, a leaf, or a cloud! I am falling into life’s sharp thorns and bleeding! Time has put me in shackles and diminished my pride, though I was once as proud, fast, and unruly as you.
5.
Make me into your musical instrument, just as the forest is when you blow through it. So what if my leaves are falling like the forest’s leaves. The ruckus of your powerful music will bring a deep, autumn music out of both me and the forest. It will be beautiful even though it’s sad. Unruly soul, you should become my soul. You should become me, you unpredictable creature. Scatter my dead thoughts across the universe like fallen leaves to inspire something new and exciting. Let this poem be a prayer that scatters ashes and sparks—as though from a fire that someone forgot to put out—throughout the human race. Speak through me, and in that way, turn my words into a prediction of the future. O wind, if winter is on its way, isn’t Spring going to follow it soon?
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“Ode to the West Wind” Themes
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Death and Rebirth
Throughout “Ode to the West Wind,” the speaker describes the West Wind as a powerful and destructive force: it drives away the summer and brings instead winter storms, chaos, and even death. Yet the speaker celebrates the West Wind and welcomes the destruction that it causes because it leads to renewal and rebirth.
The West Wind is not peaceful or pleasant. It is, the speaker notes, “the breath of Autumn’s being.” Autumn is a transitional season, when summer’s abundance begins to fade. So too, everywhere the speaker looks the West Wind drives away peace and abundance. The West Wind strips the leaves from the trees, whips up the sky, and causes huge storms on the ocean. And, in the first section of the poem, the speaker compares the dead leaves the West Wind blows to “ghosts” and “pestilence-stricken multitudes.” The West Wind turns the fall colors into something scary, associated with sickness and death.
Similarly, the clouds in the poem’s second section look like the “bright hair uplifted from the head / of some fierce Mænad.” In Greek mythology, the Mænads were the female followers of Dionysus (the god of Wine). They were famous for their wild parties and their dancing, and are often portrayed with their hair askew. The West Wind thus makes the clouds wild and drunk. It creates chaos. Unlike its “sister of the Spring”—which spreads sweet smells and beautiful flowers—the speaker associates the West Wind with chaos and death.
Yet despite the destructive power of the West Wind the speaker celebrates it—because such destruction is necessary for rebirth. As the speaker notes at the end of the poem’s first section, the West Wind is both a “destroyer” and “preserver.” These are the traditional names of two Hindu gods, Shiva and Vishnu. Vishnu’s role is to preserve the world; Shiva is supposed to destroy it. The West Wind combines these two opposite figures. As the speaker announces in the final lines—"O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"—the West Wind is able to merge these opposites because death is required for life, and winter for Spring. In order to have the beautiful renewal and rebirth that Spring promises, one needs the powerful, destructive force of the West Wind.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Poetry and Rebirth
Throughout "Ode to the West Wind," the speaker praises and celebrates the West Wind’s power—it is destructive, chaotic—and yet such destruction is necessary for rebirth and renewal. Indeed, the speaker so admires the wind that he wants to take, adopt, or absorb the West Wind’s power’s into his poetry.
The speaker describes himself as a diminished person: he is “chained and bowed.” Far from condemning the destructive power of the wind, the speaker hopes the West Wind will revive him. At different points in the poem, the speaker has different ideas about what this might look like. Most simply, the wind simply becomes the speaker, or becomes part of him. “Be thou me,” the speaker tells the wind.
But the speaker also proposes more complicated interactions between himself and the wind. At one point, he asks the Wind, to “make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.” In other words he wants to be a musical instrument, specifically the lyre, the musical instrument that poets traditionally play while they perform their poems. In this scheme, the speaker helps the wind—he’s like a musical accompaniment to it. The speaker doesn’t take an active role, the wind does. (These roles are reinforced later when the speaker imagines the Wind “driv[ing] my dead thoughts over the universe”—it certainly seems that the Wind is doing the real work).
The speaker wants to be (or to help) the West Wind because he wants to create something new, to clear away the old and the dead. Under the West Wind’s influence, his or her “dead thoughts” will “quicken a new birth”—they will create something living and new. The speaker doesn’t say exactly what new thing he hopes to create. It might be a new kind of poetry. Or it might be a new society. (Indeed, many readers have interpreted the poem as a call for political change). Either way, for the speaker, that newness can’t be achieved through compromise with the old and dead; it can emerge only through the cleansing destruction that the West Wind brings.
- See where this theme is active in the poem.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Ode to the West Wind”
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Line 1
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
The first line of “Ode to the West Wind” hints at the poem’s themes and begins to establish its form. The speaker begins his poem by talking directly to the “West Wind.” This is an instance of apostrophe: though the speaker addresses the wind, the wind's not exactly human—and perhaps not even capable of understanding what the speaker's saying, let alone responding to him.
This will be a major problem in the poem. As the poem progresses, the speaker will repeat this gesture, addressing the “West Wind,” calling it “Thou,” over and over (an instance of the poetic device anaphora). As the speaker does so, he begins to question—more and more insistently—whether apostrophe really works, whether it’s actually possible to communicate with the natural world. This is an urgent question for the speaker: he not only admires and celebrates the West Wind, he also wants to share in its power.
In the poem’s first line, the speaker says a couple of interesting things about the West Wind, things that anticipate the poem’s broader themes. First, he calls it “wild.” The West Wind seems out of control—or, at least, out of human control. It is undomesticated, untamed. The alliteration between “wild” and “West Wind” locks in this connection: it makes it seem like wildness is essential to the West Wind’s character.
Then, in the second half of the line (after a caesura), the speaker calls the West Wind “the breath of Autumn’s being.” In other words, the West Wind is the very essence of Autumn, as intimate to it as breath. Autumn is a transitional season, when Summer’s beauty and abundance begin to die out and the bleak Winter approaches. Already in this first line, the speaker suggests that the West Wind is key to that transition—that it is associated with death and decline. (Once again, alliteration—here between “breath” and “being”—locks in the association between the wind and autumn: they seem inseparable).
The first line also introduces the reader to the poem’s form—and its formal irregularities. The poem is written in terza rima. Terza rima uses three-line stanzas, whose rhymes lock together. The first stanza of the poem is rhymed ABA, the next BCB, etc. Terza rima was most famously used by the Italian poet Dante, in his epic poem The Divine Comedy. The form is so closely linked to him that just using it already feels like an allusion to Dante and his epic, which describes the soul's descent into Hell and its subsequent ascent into Heaven. This just suggests that Shelley's poem will also track the soul's journey in some way.
To make matters even more complicated, Shelley arranges each section of the poem into fourteen lines—each section is in terza rima and is a sonnet, albeit an unusual and irregular sonnet. As with most English sonnets, the poem is written in iambic pentameter, but it takes a while to establish its meter: indeed, the first six lines of the poem are all metrically irregular. The first line, for instance, contains a spondee in its second foot, "West Wind"—which gives the line six stresses instead of the usual five. These metrical variations are intentional and important: they make the poem feel as a wild and energetic as the West Wind itself.
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Lines 2-5
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: -
Lines 5-8
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, -
Lines 8-12
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: -
Lines 13-14
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear! -
Lines 15-18
T
hou 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: -
Lines 18-23
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. -
Lines 23-28
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! -
Lines 29-32
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, -
Lines 33-36
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! -
Lines 36-42
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! -
Lines 43-47
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! -
Lines 47-51
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; -
Lines 51-56
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. -
Lines 57-61
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. -
Lines 61-64
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! -
Lines 65-70
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?
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“Ode to the West Wind” Symbols
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Seeds
In lines 6-7, the speaker describes how the West Wind carries “winged seeds” to their “dark wintry bed.” In other words, the wind knocks loose seeds from the plants holding them, and carries the seeds to the ground, where they lie all winter. This is something that really happens in the fall—and the speaker is, partially, describing literal seeds involved in an actual natural process.
But the seeds also play a symbolic role in the poem. They symbolize the possibility of rebirth and renewal. As the speaker notes in the next few lines, as soon as spring comes, the seeds sprout, producing “sweet buds” and “living hues and odours.” If the seeds are like “corpse[s]” in their “grave[s],” then their rebirth in the Spring is something like resurrection. (Shelley was, famously, an atheist, and so this image of resurrection is notably secular: instead of involving God, he portrays it as an entirely natural process). For all its destructive power, the West Wind plays an important role in bringing about that rebirth and renewal: without it, the seeds would never get to the ground and start growing. In this way, the West Wind earns the title the speaker gives it later in the poem: it is both a “destroyer” and a “preserver.”
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Flocks
In line 11, the speaker describes the Spring wind “driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air.” In other words, the wind is like a shepherd; it helps bring out the buds of flowers in the same way a shepherd drives their sheep, their “flocks,” to pasture.
This simile is already pretty complicated, and it’s made even more so by the symbol in the middle of it, the “flocks.” “Flocks” of sheep are a traditional symbol in poetry for innocence and beauty. In pastoral poetry—a whole genre of poetry dedicated to talking about shepherds and sheep—the presence of the "flock" often suggests that the shepherd is free from politics and all the dirt and complication of life in the city. In this sense, the “flocks” suggest an important contrast with the speaker’s characterization of the West Wind, which is so closely associated with death, violence, and chaos. As a symbol, the “flocks” suggest a world where such negative things are of no concern, because it is so pure, innocent, and beautiful.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Old Palaces and Towers
In line 33, the speaker describes the “blue Mediterranean” asleep, dreaming of “old palaces and towers.” The speaker is careful to place this dream vision in a specific place, the Bay of Baiae near Naples, in Italy. And so the speaker may have specific buildings in Naples in mind, buildings he wants the reader to see in their mind.
But the “old palaces and towers” also take on a symbolic significance in the line. They symbolize the past itself—history—the glorious accomplishment of previous generations. The personified “Blue Mediterranean” looks at these symbols of the past with comfort and complacency: he doesn’t feel any need to challenge or change them. It seems likely, though, that the West Wind might feel differently. (Indeed, the speaker brings the “blue Mediterranean” into the poem in order to draw a contrast between it and the violence and energy of the West Wind). The symbol thus gives the reader a quiet, implicit hint: part of what the speaker hopes the West Wind will destroy is the past, in order to make space for a new society to emerge.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Thorns of Life
When the speaker complains about falling on the “thorns of life” in line 54, he isn’t talking about literal thorns. Instead, the thorns are symbols—symbols for the difficulties that one faces in life: perhaps pain, disappointment, or aging. The speaker doesn’t specify what, exactly, he’s struggling with—what precise forces or feelings have limited his capacities and creative powers. What matters, instead, is simply that the speaker does feel limited and diminished, like he has lost something important about himself—something the West Wind would help him regain. The “thorns of life” are thus a very vague, general symbol: they stand for the difficulties that the speaker faces in general, without embodying a particular or specific problem or disappointment.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Blood
In line 54, the speaker uses the “thorns of life” as a symbol for the troubles and difficulties that he faces in his life—without specifying what, exactly, he’s struggling with. He ends the same line with another symbol: “I bleed,” he exclaims. Here, the blood that the speaker bleeds serves as a symbol for his disappointment and diminishment. He feels like he has lost something essential, important—he is less powerful and creative than he once was. The blood symbolizes this lost power, this lost aspect of his own personality.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Lyre
In line 57, the speaker expresses a strange desire: he wants the West Wind to “make [him its] lyre.” A lyre is a small hand-held harp. In ancient Greece, poets would play the lyre as they performed their poems. As a result the lyre often serves as a symbol for poetry itself. It does that here: it symbolizes poetry.
But the way the symbol is used in the poem suggests that the speaker has an unusual relationship with poetry. The speaker doesn’t want to play the lyre, he wants to be the lyre, the instrument that the poet plays—in which case, the West Wind itself would be the poet. In other words, the poet is not asking the wind for inspiration or for it to make him into a poet. He wants to be in a more subservient position—he wants to accompany the wind, to help make the wind's poem sound sweeter.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Ashes and Sparks
In lines 66-7, the speaker asks the West Wind to scatter his “words” like “ashes and sparks…among mankind.” The “ashes and sparks” are symbolic—the speaker doesn’t want to start a literal fire. Instead, he wants his words to serve as inspiration and encouragement, which will help people break free from the oppression they currently endure. (The speaker never explicitly says what he wants to see change—but it seems to be something political). The “ashes and sparks” are thus symbols for the beginning of change, the start of a revolution, the opening of something radically new.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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Spring
Throughout the poem, the West Wind has been a force of destruction and death. But the speaker has celebrated its power. In the last line, it becomes clear why. The speaker wants renewal and rebirth, a transformation of society. And the wind helps to bring about that rebirth, by sweeping away everything that has grown tired, old, and oppressive. In this sense, it is like "Winter." And the renewal that it promises to help bring about is like “Spring.”
Spring, in the last line of the poem (and also in line 9), is thus a symbol for renewal and rebirth—the emergence of something radically new. This symbol is at the heart of the poem, the thing it wants to see happen. The poem is an “Ode” to the West Wind because the West Wind, with all its destructive force, is necessary to make this symbol real.
- See where this symbol appears in the poem.
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“Ode to the West Wind” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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End-Stopped Line
In its first three sections, “Ode to the West Wind” uses mostly weak end-stops—end-stops that barely register as end-stops. The speaker’s sentences are so long that there are places where it feels like the sentence is coming to a close, that things are finished, wrapping up—but then the sentence keeps going, spilling forward into the next line.
There’s a good example of this in the sentence that starts in line 23, “Thou dirge / of the dying year …” At the end of line 25, the sentence feels more or less grammatically complete. The speaker has called the wind a “dirge” and uses a metaphor to add that night-fall will be like the dome of a “vast sepulchre” hanging over it. (In other words, the night looks like the dome of a big tomb). The reader might reasonably expect the speaker to then move on and say something new about the wind. Instead, in the next line, line 26, the speaker continues to develop the same metaphor—he adds that the tomb is “vaulted” with “all thy congregated might / of vapours.”
That is, the night sky has clouds running across it and those clouds look like the ribs or arches on the inside of the dome. Line 25 is technically end-stopped, but because the sentence spills past that end-stop, it doesn’t feel that way—and so it doesn’t really function as an end-stop: it doesn't introduce the kind of separation between lines that a stronger end-stop would. The poem is so energetic that it simply speeds past boundaries like these. Most of the end-stops in the poem's first three sections work in a similar way: they are technically end-stops, but they don't feel like it. This gives the poem a lot of velocity and energy. Like the wind it describes, it seems to break through all the limitations placed upon it.
In the poem’s final two sections, though, the speaker does start to use end-stops with more strength and conviction—particularly in lines in which the speaker describes himself. Lines 43, 44, 53, and 54 all follow this pattern. Look, for example, at line 43: “If I were a dead leaf thou mightiest bear.” The line is grammatically complete and cut off from the next line, “If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee”—which is also a complete, independent unit. These end-stops emphasize the speaker’s isolation—he wants to be the wind’s “comrade,” to travel with it across the earth. But he can’t. He is isolated, complete on his own—much like the lines that describe him.
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Enjambment
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Caesura
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Simile
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Metaphor
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Apostrophe
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Personification
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Refrain
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Repetition
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Allusion
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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"Ode to the West Wind" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Breath
- Being
- Enchanter
- Hectic
- Pestilence-stricken
- Chariotest
- Azure
- Clarion
- Plain
- Mid
- Commotion
- Boughs
- Aëry
- Maenads
- Verge
- Zenith
- Locks
- Dirge
- Sepulchre
- Congregated
- Mediterranean
- Lull'd
- Coil
- Crystalline
- Streams
- Pumice
- Baiae
- Atlantic
- Chasms
- Oozy
- Sapless
- Foliage
- Despoil
- Pant
- Impulse
- Uncontrollable
- Outstrip
- Skiey
- Striven
- Chain'd
- Bow'd
- Lyre
- Tumult
- Harmonies
- Tone
- Impetuous
- Quicken
- Incantation
- Verse
- Unextinguish'd
- Unawaken'd
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Exhalation. The speaker compares the west wind to someone exhaling: it is as though Autumn itself is breathing out.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Ode to the West Wind”
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Form
As its title announces, “Ode to the West Wind” is an ode, a form that has existed in Western culture since the Greeks. As the ode has moved across languages, cultures, and poetic traditions, it hasn't used a single meter or rhyme scheme. Instead, poets write odes in the forms that make the most sense to them. Shelley wrote his ode in terza rima, a form that the Italian poet Dante made famous in his depiction of Hell in the Inferno.
Furthermore, Shelley arranges his terza rima sections as sonnets, a form made popular in English by poets like William Shakespeare and Thomas Wyatt. To put that more bluntly: each section of the poem is its own sonnet. Yet the sonnets in Shelley's poem are slightly unusual, since they don't follow the rhyme scheme for either a Shakespearean or a Petrarchan sonnet, two of the most popular types of sonnets.
However, even though this poem's sonnets are a little weird, they quietly acknowledge the history and importance of the sonnet in English poetry. "Ode to the West Wind" is a kind of miniature sonnet sequence, like Edmund Spencer’s Amoretti or Sir Phillip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. These older poets used sonnets to depict speakers who were tangled in hopeless love affairs. Shelley updates this tradition by depicting a speaker professing profound admiration for an element of nature—the west wind.
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Meter
“Ode to the West Wind” is written in iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter has a duh-DUH rhythm, with five feet in each line. One can hear this rhythm clearly in the poem’s 7th line ("winged" is pronounced so that it has two syllables):
The wing- | ed seeds, | where they | lie cold | and low.
However, for most of “Ode to the West Wind” the meter is not smooth and regular. Instead, it is full of metrical substitutions, which alter the rhythm and feeling of its lines. One can see this in the poem’s first stanza, which doesn’t contain a single metrically regular line.
O wild | West Wind, | thou breath | of Aut- | umn's be- | ing,
Thou, from | whose un- | seen pre- | sence the | leaves dead
Are dri- | ven, like ghosts | from an | enchant- | er flee- | ingThe first line of the poem starts with a normal, iambic foot: “O wild.” But the next foot is a spondee: “West Wind.” And the line ends with an extra, unstressed syllable: “being.” (This is a feminine ending.)
Line 2 is more regular, but it ends with another spondee: “leaves dead.” As a result, both of the first two lines in the poem have an extra stressed syllable. Line 3 also ends on an unstressed syllable. Furthermore, this line is a full twelve syllables long! Thus, though the poem loosely follows iambic pentameter, it mostly employs highly irregular lines.
Such metrical details can become overwhelming; the lines are so irregular that it gets hard to fully describe all their metrical variations. The good news is that these individual variations aren’t as important as their general effect. What really matters is that the poem starts in a kind of chaotic state. Usually poets like to establish a meter first and then introduce variations on it. Not Shelley: the first metrically regular line of the poem is the poem's 7th line! In other words, it takes the poem a full six lines before it finds its rhythm. And even after that it often diverges into irregularities.
The poem does this purposefully: the speaker is imitating the west wind itself. The speaker wants to take on the violent energy of the wind, the way it rushes through the world, sowing chaos. The poem’s unsteady meter reflects the wind’s energy and violence—and tries to make that energy and violence part of the poem.
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Rhyme Scheme
“Ode to the West Wind” is written in terza rima. Terza rima is mostly defined by its interlocking rhyme scheme. The first stanza of a terza rima poem follows an ABA rhyme scheme. The next stanza picks up the B rhyme and adds a new rhyme: BCB. Then the pattern repeats itself: CDC, DED. There’s no limit to how long a poet can go on like this: a terza rima poem may include any number of stanzas. But the final two lines of terza rima always form a rhyming couplet, EE. This final couplet serves as a kind of punctuation, marking the end of the poem or the section of the poem. Thus, in this poem, each section follows the following rhyme scheme:
ABA BCB CDC DED EE
As with the poem's meter, one finds a number of weird, irregular rhymes in "Ode to the West Wind." For instance, there are the slant rhymes in the poem's first section—between "thou" and "low" in lines 5 and 7, or "everywhere" and "hear" in lines 13-14. The wind is a disruptive, chaotic force: the poem's strained rhymes reflect its power and its violence. The wind is so powerful that it has knocked the poem out of alignment, roughing up its meter and disrupting its rhymes.
Terza rima is originally an Italian form. It was developed during the Middle Ages and popularized by the poet Dante, in his epic poem The Divine Comedy, which follows the poet on a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. For many readers, any poem written in terza rima instantly calls Dante to mind. It’s thus associated with some of the most powerful and ambitious poetry ever written. The poem’s rhyme scheme suggests that the speaker intends this poem to be ambitious and deadly serious—that he is taking the reader on a journey as equally epic as The Divine Comedy.
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“Ode to the West Wind” Speaker
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The speaker of “Ode to the West Wind” is anonymous. However, the reader does learn some important and helpful information about the speaker late in the poem. The speaker is not a child anymore, and is man, since in line 48 he refers to his “boyhood” as being over. He looks back on childhood mournfully: he feels like he’s lost his freedom and strength as he’s grown up. In the poem's fourth section, he notes that as a child he was "the comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven"—meaning that he was able to explore and wander with the west wind as it raced across the sky.
Further, the speaker is a poet. In line 65, the speaker asks the wind to “scatter” his “verse” across “mankind.” He is interested in the west wind because of the way that it promises to expand and empower his creativity. The speaker further seems to have frustrations with the world in which he lives: he wants to send his ideas and words out into the world with the hope that they will spark change and renewal. Though the speaker doesn’t ever tell the reader what he’s frustrated with, many readers have assumed that his frustrations are political in nature: the speaker wants his poem to help create a new, and better society.
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“Ode to the West Wind” Setting
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According to Shelley’s own note on the poem, “Ode to the West Wind” was composed in the woods near Florence, Italy in 1819: “This poem was…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 ...” The poem is thus linked—for its poet, at least—to a specific time and place.
But—surprisingly—the poem doesn't really refer to that time and place: there are no specific references to Florence or the Arno river that runs through it (though the speaker does eventually refer to "Baiae's bay," a bay near Naples in the south of Italy). And the poem doesn’t describe a particular gust of wind. Instead, the poem soars across the world, describing the west wind’s effects on the earth, the sea, and the skies. Because the poem is about the west wind in general (and not some particular gust or storm) it has to transcend a specific setting and talk about how the west wind behaves generally. Thus, the poem's setting encompasses the entire world.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Ode to the West Wind”
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Literary Context
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an important poet in a movement known as Romanticism. Romanticism appeared at the end of the 18th century (around, say, 1780). It was a reaction to the intellectual and poetic trends that dominated in the 1700s. Prominent thinkers like Voltaire and Denis Diderot stressed the importance of reason, rationality, and science. Anything that wasn’t reasonable and scientific, they rejected—treating it as backward and primitive. These thinkers had a big effect on poetry. Poets worked to purify their poems of anything that might be irrational or out-of-control.
For early Romantic poets, like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this emphasis on reason and rationality felt limiting—almost like a kind of repression. They sought to liberate the powers of the irrational, to write poetry that tapped into the deep, dark undercurrents of the human mind. Shelley, who wasn’t even born until Romanticism had gotten underway, followed their example. But he, along with his peers—poets like John Keats and Lord Byron—felt that poets like Wordsworth had betrayed the movement they started, becoming too conservative as they aged. He hoped to restore Romanticism to its earlier, more revolutionary possibilities.
Shelley also often looked to the Greeks for philosophical and poetic inspiration. In "Ode to the West Wind," he adapts the ancient Greek form of the ode. The ancient poet Pindar composed odes to celebrate the victories of athletes in the Olympic Games. In this tradition, odes usually praise powerful and important people, or even gods. Because of their association with powerful people, such odes tend to be politically conservative poems that praise society as it currently is, instead of calling for change.
Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” follows many of the traditions of the ode: it is an ornate poem, full of elevated language and tricky poetic devices. And it praises the destructive power of the west wind, asking if the poet might share in that power. However, the west wind is, of course, different than a king or an Olympic athlete. The speaker praises a facet of the weather rather than something human.
Yet just because Shelley’s poem is about the natural world doesn’t mean that it’s disconnected from human politics. Many readers interpret the poem’s ending as a demand for social change—change that Shelley hopes his poem can inspire.
Historical Context
“Ode to the West Wind” was written in 1819. Its author, Percy Shelley, held a number of political beliefs that, at the time, were pretty radical: he was in favor, for instance, of abolishing slavery; he developed ideas about using non-violent protest to resist unjust power structures; and he advocated for the independence of Ireland from England—among many other positions.
But 1819 was a difficult time to be a politically radical person. Whereas the French Revolution had been a symbol of democratic hope to a previous generation of poets, such as Wordsworth, by 1814 the King of France, Louis XVIII, had been reinstated. All the bloodshed and energy of the revolution had resulted in a return to monarchy—the very form of government the revolution had tried to get rid of.
In England, society was becoming more and more conservative as the Victorian Era approached. In other words, for someone like Shelley, it probably felt like the world was moving backward in 1819, away from the direction he hoped it would eventually take. This sense of defeat is evident in “Ode to the West Wind,” reflected in the speaker’s feeling that only destruction of society as it is currently can pave the way for something new and better.
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More “Ode to the West Wind” Resources
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External Resources
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Percy Bysse Shelley — A detailed biography of Shelley from the Poetry Foundation.
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How Percy Shelley Stirred His Politics Into His Teacup — An article on Shelley's anti-slavery politics, from NPR.
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"Ode to the West Wind" Read Aloud — Tom O'Bedlam reads Percy Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" aloud in its entirety.
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The Romantics — An essay on the history of Romantic poetry, the poetic movement to which Shelley belonged, from the British Library.
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Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry" — The full text of Percy Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry"—an essay in which he lays out his ideas about what poetry should be and how it could be a force for change in the world.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley
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