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“Ode To The West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. ... Despite his origins within the landed gentry, Shelley had concerns for social justice and these concerns manifest themselves frequently within his poetry, for example, “Ode to the West Wind.”
Each of the seven parts of "Ode to the West Wind" contains five stanzas--four three-line stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. ...
The speaker invokes the "wild West Wind" (1) of autumn, which scatters the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that the wind, a "destroyer and preserver," (14) hear him. The speaker calls the wind the "dirge / Of the dying year,"(23,24) and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again implores it to hear him. Shelley also called the wind to stirs the Mediterranean from "his summer dreams,"(29) and cleaves the Atlantic into rough chasms, making the "sapless foliage"(40) of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear him.
The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, "the comrade of thy wandering over heaven,"(49) then he would never have needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers. He pleads with the wind to lift him "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!"--for though he is like the wind at heart, untamable and proud--he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the earth.
The speaker asks the wind to "make me thy lyre,"(57) to be his own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, "like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth!
Approximate Word count = 1500
Approximate Pages = 6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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