Ode to The West Wind: For Spring is Not Far Behind

Commanding to be proclaimed upon a mountain-top, “Ode to the West Wind” is crafted with such a structure and style that even the seasoned literary connoisseur is overwhelmed. Boasting a lofty seventy lines, this masterpiece is no piece of cake to digest. Digging deeper into Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1819 composition, one can see the old cliché “when one door closes, another opens.” This theme is abundant throughout the work and also reaches its prime in the last line of the poem, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind”.

By means of composition, “Ode to the West Wind” is an intense combination of figurative language, sentence structure, cantos, sonnets, rhyme, and the list continues. As a start, take a look at Shelley’s use of punctuation. The first “sonnet” of the poem is a single run on sentence. This is a prime example of how overwhelming and intoxicating the West Wind is to the speaker. The speaker begins to talk and then just keeps going and going, appealing to the powers and wonders of the West Wind. In a sense, the speaker of this poem is the West Wind’s biggest fan. After that, the second canto sees the speaker calming down slightly, or it appears that way, because there are an amazing two sentences this time! The speaker finally takes a breath in his admiration of the mighty wind in this canto, and the trend continues throughout the piece as the cantos earn more and more sentences in the ode’s progression. This can be interpreted by looking into how one might progress in persuading someone - or something in this case - to do something for that person. You always begin with politeness, flattery, describing the “breath of Autumn” (line 1). Butter them up, and do so elaborately. Then, you start getting to the point, tel...

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... because there was a storm, and spring was not far behind. He packed his supplies, got up, and moved on with his life. He saw the door of his past close behind him. He moved forward to his future with a new outlook on life. Just like the West Wind brings an end to the year and youth of nature, life brings death and decay. Without these, there would not be a generation of the next great thing… appreciation.

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Coleman, Elliot, ed. Selected Poems of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. The Programmed Classics, 1967. 454. Print.

Nims, John Frederick, comp. The Harper Anthology of Poetry. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1981. 764. Print.

Reiger, James, comp. Modern Critical Views: Percy Bysshe Shelley. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985. 57-72. Print.