The Endless Vitality of "Ode to the West Wind"

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819 work “Ode to the West Wind” endures through sheer vitality in the English language. The verses are capacious yet offer great speed. His creation sports exuberance, while the formal control of its terza rima keeps the cataract of breathless euphoria from turning to a gushing waterfall. This ode still shows contemporary poets how to court magnitude of effect, without grandstanding. Poets could and should examine this ode to learn how to go full throttle into sublimity, without trivializing genuine rapture.

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 winged 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, oh hear!

The simile in line four imbues the wind with an enchanter’s magic, dead leaves “fleeing” straight into the second stanza. The wind’s breath brings life to winged seeds, which portend the poet’s rebirth into a higher consciousness. Commas, conjunctions, and line breaks simulate the whirling rush and settling of the leaves and seeds, as they sweep and sail along the metered fields and skies. Shelley moves with ease from the infinitesimal to “multitudes,” and from there opens quickly to the “dreaming earth” itself. Figuring each seed as a “corpse” to be reawakened lends this immortal poem an almost ghoulish vivacity. One cannot easily forget, tracking the spell of individual images, that Shelley consistently supplies grit and bite. For every "aëry" there is a "wintry."

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,

Angels of rain and lightning: 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. 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!

In a critique of postmodernism’s insistence that everything is surface, Alan Liu, meditating on William Wordsworth’s The Prelude alongside William Gibson’s Neuromancer, tries to find a critical idiom apt for mediation between the worldly and the otherworldly. He insists that “transcendence is recuperated within the banal-the denotative banal of commonplace experience.” That gives us hope that the ode, as a form, today allows us to examine the ordinary, but do more than regurgitate Pablo Neruda’s odes to his socks. Shelley shook the foundations of the ode as ceremonial when he composed his radical “Ode to the West Wind.” This poem of beauty is driven by a guerrilla spirit.