Poery response ODE

Britton Woodall

English AP

Jernigan

8 March 2011

Wild Wild West Wind

            In the poem “Ode to the West Wind” Percy Shelley expresses a positive faith in the cycle of nature in order to expose the reason of man’s problems as a means through which he receives his blessings.

            Shelley begins his ode by exalting the wind because it blows the dead leaves during Autumn. He begins the poem with death for a specific reason. The dead leaves and the dying Autumn represent man’s universal pain and she specifically points out the seasons in which a man tends to suffer by calling upon autumn.

            The rest of the poem tells the story of wind as the force that paves the way for life and blessing, represented by the season of Spring. She says, “Winged seeds, where they lie cold and low/ Each like a corpse in its grave, until/ Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow.” In this stanza alone, Shelley walks through the natural process from autumn to spring, from life to death. The wind takes on the same role in nature as the God or a god does for man as Shelley calls it a “destroyer and preserver.” It blows the leafs and seeds from the trees in the autumn, spreads them, then they bloom and grow in the spring.

            Shelley reverses his role in the poem from an observer to a potential leaf or seed experiencing the powers of the wind. He clarifies his intentions of the poem by putting himself in place of everything he had described previously to this point by saying, “If I were a dead leaf… If I were a swift cloud.” And confidently returns to his original faith in the seasons of man with the last stanza “The trumpet of prophecy! Oh wind,/ If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?”