Ode to The West Wind Poem Analysis
by Lillian Bonar
Essay: Ode to The West Wind Poem Analysis
Pages: 11
Rating: 3 stars
Download Links:
• Ode to The West Wind Poem Analysis.pdf
• Ode to The West Wind Poem Analysis.doc
Percy Bysshe Shelley was the definition of a Romantic poet. His philosophical ideals emphasized the importance of
aestheticism and his poetry clearly portrayed the beauty and majesty of the natural world. Like many of his
Romantic peers, Shelley’s own life was short, tragic, and full of hardships. Drowned in a boating accident before
the age of thirty, his one desire that his words would impact and inspire did not become a reality until long after
his departure. In his poem, “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley uses symbolism, simile, meter, imagery, and many
other devices to present the power of nature and the speaker’s hope for this power to become part of him in his
mission to bring about inspiration and transformation for creative processes.
The poem is divided into five stanzas, each fourteen lines with a couplet at its end, suspiciously resembling a
sonnet. In the first of these stanzas, Shelley begins his ode describing the power and influence of the west wind to
bring about death. The sheer control of the wind is represented in the ode’s form. The compactness of the stanza
couplet sequences gives each part of Shelley’s work a compactness and solidarity (Ahn). Through the use of simile
and imagery, he gives the power of the wind a sinister feeling when he compares the leaves to “ghosts from an
enchanter fleeing,” and again with the phrase “chariotest to their dark wintry bed.” To understand Shelley’s dark
tone, a search into the poems background shows that at the time the ode was pinned, he was recovering from the
death of his son William and negative reviews of his latest works (Ahn).
More importantly, this stanza introduces the important idea that the wind has dual natures, one being destruction
and the other in c...