Essay #6

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Billy Tooma

ARLT-321-01

Dr. Robert Ready

Four Elements + One

Percy Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) is an irregular ode, written in first person

with the speaker showing his emotional pain through a meditative prayer as he tries invoking the

dualistic powers of the Wind to resurrect the beauty it allowed to wither away. The poem is

crafted in a neoclassical style: five sonnets (four tercets and a couplet), representing the four

classical elements, plus a new one. Shelley uses terza rima, Dante’s form in his Divine Comedy,

and forms an ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, EE rhyme scheme.

Sonnet I (representing earth) begins with the alliterative line “O wild West Wind, thou

breath of Autumn’s being,” (1), alluding to the opening of The Canterbury Tales. The speaker

personifies the Wind, hoping that this being of the natural world will hear him, and respond.

Imagery of decay is created by setting the beginning in autumn. Nature is personified again when

the speaker says, “leaves dead/Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing” (2). The leaves

turn and fall, dying, leaving behind “ghosts.” The speaker believes humans are not the only ones

with souls, and that the surviving bits of trees were once living and breathing.

The speaker points to a lack of prejudice, likening the Wind to the Grim Reaper, saying,

“Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,/Pestilence-stricken multitudes” (4-5). The four

traditional colors associated with the human race are being used to again connect the dying

leaves with people. Another link to the Grim Reaper is made with the lines “O Thou,/chariotest

to their dark wintry bed” (5-6), showing that no matter how beautiful, the Wind will strike each

leaf, sending it to its grave.

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The image of decomposition has been central, but now there is hope for renewal. “The

winged seeds” (7) that are lying within the cold earth are the potential life that is to come once

spring has arrived via the blowing of the “azure sister of Spring” (8). The Italian word for “blue”

is being used, creating the image of water (life). The blow of “Her clarion o’er the dreaming

earth” (10) continues to give hope that nature isn’t dead forever; it is in slumber.

The speaker calls the Wind “Wild Spirit,” a direct reference to it being divine, though not

necessarily God. He also names it as “Destroyer” and “Preserver,” solidifying one of the poem’s

themes: duality. The version of the West Wind that comes in autumn is a killer, yet the one that

returns in springtime breathes life back into the world. The sonnet ends with the speaker

requesting the Wind to hear his plea.

Sonnet II (representing air) opens with the line “Loose clouds like Earth’s decaying

leaves are shed” (16). This brings the setting into the sky, but keeps it connected to Sonnet I

through simile. The “tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean” (17) shows the Wind’s ability to

create a stormy sea, creating havoc and the inability to distinguish the horizon.

The “Angels of rain and lightning” (18) that the speaker describes continue the theme of

duality. One thinks of an angel as a graceful celestial being. But here these messengers are

accompanied by a tempest. These Judeo-Christian characters are compared with “some fierce

Maenad” (21), the female followers of Dionysus (a deity associated with resurrection), known as

the “raving ones.” The concept of a heavenly messenger/follower able to turn from luminous to

dark and back again relates to the cyclical seasonal change.

The lines before the second couplet “Thou Dirge/Of the dying year, to which this closing

night/Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre” (23-25) carry on the theme of death started in Sonnet

I. “Dirge” is recited for a soul in descent, and as the calendar year comes to a close so winter also

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reaches its height. This leads into “Black rain and fire and hail will burst” (28) in that it must get

darkest before light reenters. The sonnet ends with another request from the speaker to the Wind

to hear his plea.

Sonnet III (representing water) brings the setting into the Mediterranean Sea. The speaker

mentions “the summer dreams” (29) from which the Wind has awoken. The “chrystalline

streams,/Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay” (31-32) invokes a calm current, while the speaker

claims the Wind “saw in sleep old palaces and towers” (33). The Wind spends its summer in a

blissful tomb of human history. The ruins reflected in the water shows another form of duality:

civilizations will rise and fall just like winter’s dreariness will come to a halt, allowing for

spring’s arrival.

The underwater plant life is connected to the dying/dead leaves in Sonnet I. The “azure

moss and flowers/So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!” (34-35) shows a beauty that covers

the emptied human halls seen by the speaker in the watery reflection. Manmade structures are

spoken of for the first time in this sonnet. They are not natural; they are ugly. The speaker says

that they “know/Thy voice, and suddenly grow grey with fear,/And tremble and despoil

themselves” (40-42). The sea plants feel empathy for their surface counterparts and they decay as

well. So the Wind, which does not directly penetrate the surface of the water, still proves deadly.

The sonnet ends with the speaker’s third request to the Wind to hear his plea.

Sonnet IV breaks away from the order of the classical elements with an interjection of an

“I,” and direct focus is taken away from the Wind. The speaker says, “If I were a dead leaf thou

mightiest beat;/If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;/A wave to pant beneath thy power” (43-

44), referring back to the first three sonnets and the first three elements. The fifth element of this

poem is humanity. While the four classical ones make up the natural world, humanity is the

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product of said world, and, possesses the ability to manipulate the elements or be destroyed by

them.

The speaker begs the Wind to “share/The impulse of thy strength, only less free/Than

thou, O Uncontroulable!” (45-47). It seemed that the speaker was pleading with the Wind to

bring spring back soon, but he is actually asking for the powers of the Wind to be shared with

him. A short lament follows: “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” (47-

51). The speaker, as a child, thought the possibility of becoming one with the Wind was a

realistic pursuit. This is childhood innocence being revisited: when the impossible once didn’t

seem as such.

The speaker realizes that try as he may, the Wind and he can never achieve the type of

bond he has prayed for. He makes another personal plea: “Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!”

(52). The speaker’s use of the exclamation points work to express ultimate desperation. The

realization of this impossible-to-achieve desire happens with the line “I fall upon the thorns of

life! I bleed!” (54). The Wind is a dual force that cannot be contained. It cannot be matched in its

power to destroy and renew. It isn’t human like the speaker, who will not be able to experience

the sensations he yearns for. The Wind will never die, and the speaker comes to understand why

he feels the way he does in the fourth couplet. He says, “A heavy weight of hours has chained

and bowed/One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud” (55-56). “Hours,” are short

services of prayers that are recited in intervals on a regular basis, and the speaker (a powerless

mortal) feels imprisoned by them.

Sonnet V (representing fire) changes the plea of the speaker to the Wind from being one

who can fly with it to being its “lyre” (57). He settles on being its instrument, a slave. The

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speaker makes himself the forest, asking, “What if my leaves are falling like its own!” (58),

because it is that which the flames would be capable of engulfing.

Another aspect of duality appears in the lines “Be thou, Spirit fierce,/My spirit! Be thou

me, impetuous one!” (61-62). The speaker challenges the Wind’s strength, calling on it to attack.

Malicious intent is canceled out with the declaration: “Drive my dead thoughts over the

universe/Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!” (63-64). The Wind is being asked to

revive the natural world.

All that died in the autumn and winter will rise again. The fires will “Scatter, as from an

unextinguished hearth/Ashes, and sparks, my words among mankind!” (66-67), and help spread

the speaker’s optimism in the same way that the dormant seeds from Sonnet I will awaken to

spread and give new life. A rhetorical question ends the ode: “The trumpet of a prophecy! O

Wind,/If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (69-70). There is no doubt that spring will

follow winter, but the true message from those final lines is relief will come after a period of

suffering.

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Work Cited

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Ode to the West Wind.” Shelley’s Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H.

Reiman and Neil Fraistat. Norton Critical Editions. 2nd Ed. New York: W.W.

Norton & Company. 2002. 298-301. Print.