Ode to The West Wind Poem Analysis

Percy Bysshe Shelley was the definition of a Romantic poet. His philosophical ideals emphasized the importance of aestheticism and his poetry clearly portrayed the beauty and majesty of the natural world. Like many of his Romantic peers, Shelley’s own life was short, tragic, and full of hardships. Drowned in a boating accident before the age of thirty, his one desire that his words would impact and inspire did not become a reality until long after his departure. In his poem, “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley uses symbolism, simile, meter, imagery, and many other devices to present the power of nature and the speaker’s hope for this power to become part of him in his mission to bring about inspiration and transformation for creative processes.
The poem is divided into five stanzas, each fourteen lines with a couplet at its end, suspiciously resembling a sonnet. In the first of these stanzas, Shelley begins his ode describing the power and influence of the west wind to bring about death. The sheer control of the wind is represented in the ode’s form. The compactness of the stanza couplet sequences gives each part of Shelley’s work a compactness and solidarity (Ahn). Through the use of simile and imagery, he gives the power of the wind a sinister feeling when he compares the leaves to “ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,” and again with the phrase “chariotest to their dark wintry bed.” To understand Shelley’s dark tone, a search into the poems background shows that at the time the ode was pinned, he was recovering from the death of his son William and negative reviews of his latest works (Ahn).
More importantly, this stanza introduces the important idea that the wind has dual natures, one being destruction and the other in c...

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...tice (Napierkowski and Ruby 163). However, seasons of life do not come and go as one pleases. Although Shelley never witnessed the magnitude of impact his poetry made, it cannot be denied that he was indeed one of the most important Romantic poets.

Works Cited
Ahn, Jinny. "Percy B. Shelley (1792-1822) and 'The Ode to the West Wind'." Ashes Sparks & Hypertext. Phillipson/ UC Berkeley , June 2003. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
Fogle, Richard H. "The Imaginal Design of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"." JSTOR. John Hopkins University Press, 10 Oct. 2012. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
Mooney, Patrick. "Temporal Dislocations and Visions of Interpretation in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind"." Patrick Brian Mooney. Ed. Patrick Mooney. N.p., 11 Mar. 2014. Web. 2 Apr. 2014.
Napierkowski, Marie Rose, and Mary Ruby. Poetry for Students. 2nd Vol. Detroit: Gale, 2007. 161-176. Web.