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ODE TO THE WEST WIND by SARWAL
ODE TO THE WEST WIND by SARWAL
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worried recent critics, may express the essence of the view. From
this standpoint it is best imagined by a speaker.
Who, in the whole setting of the speech, represents the fourth
factor, the listener? The West Wind itself, of course, deified. The
Ode is a prayer from the romantic liturgy of Nature. The speaker,
therefore, addresses himself to a god in whom his audience will
with difficulty believe. Yet such belief must be moved in them.
The intense sincerity of the prayer must take its chance of sus-
pending disbelief. This is a poem which cannot be directed to,
but must be overheard by, an audience. The prayer, the godling,
the Shelleyan heart; these are the factors none of which can be
renegued.
The speaker, the listener, the situation and the subject-matter
have now been considered. There remains the fifth factor, the
medium or linguistic material; and this has four aspects, words,
speech-quality, syntax and vocal presentation.
The words and images of the Ode are in the main unequivocal.
Certain cruxes which must be resolved, however, include
I. 4. pale, and hectic red. The comma seems to establish
pale as a colour, a seeming false division. I think it preferable
to take pale with hectic as qualifying red. The poets
imagination is at this point passing, through the colour similarity
which associates them, from the leaves . . yellow and black to
the pestilence-stricken multitudes.
I. 6. chariotest. How does one confidently imagine the wind
charioting the winged seeds? Rogers7 suggests the word may have
lingered from Southeys review of The Revolt of Islam in which
Shelleys beliefs were pictured as confounded in the sea of ortho-
doxy like the chariots of Pharaoh. If so, Shelley is using it defiantly
and with a Blakean inversion of values to suggest truth over-
whelmed by the momentary triumph of pseudo-righteousness. I
prefer to find the key to the image in the passage from the
Phuedrus where Zeus, the mighty lord, holding the reigns of a
Shelley at Work.
S p ~ SHELLEYS
O ODE TO T E E WEST W I N D 183
winged chariot, leads the way in heaven, ordering all and taking
care of all. Winged thus gains appropriate Platonic overtones
(in addition to its association with the Greek commonplace.
winged words), and vocally chariotest has the thunder of
unconquerable certainty about it.
11. 15, 19. The stream and the blue surface of the wind. The
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that of ordinary life, Oer and midst are negligible, and the
l1
and these lines must be strongly felt and planted. To avoid ham-
ming hear 0 hear, and to preserve its intensity, is a test of any
speakers virtuosity.
15. The vocative note of Thou and Thou dirge is tinged
with awe at the energy and vastness of the storm.
16. The propagation of cloud from leaf imagery occurs in the
phrase Loose clouds, like earths decaying leaves. The voice has
a faint inflexion of surprise for registering such a linkage of ideas,
and this assists the freshness good reading aims at.
27, 28. The voice, after echoing in the vast sepulchre, con-
centrates its muscular energy on solid, black rain and burst.
29-33. The axis to establish in the long passage qualifying
Thou is who didst waken . . . the blue Meditteranean . . . where
he lay . . . and saw in sleep. The visual imagination is called
into intense activity in lines 33 to 35, where the sights described
are not so much those of a dream as of a sort of veridical vision.
By flowers the brilliance is so strong that a sense of bafned
wonder oppresses the close of the sentence.
37. A .breath is needed before the Atlantics level powers,
or the requisite energy of cleave and chasm will fail. The
voice emerges with such threatening power on know Thy voice
as to indicate Shelleys identifying the shadowy images of the
deep ocean with the colourless stagnation of tyranny. The
symbolic overtones of many words in the Ode would make a
separate study. For instance storm in line 23 almost certainly
resounds with the political use of the word in a letter to Peacock
of 9 September, 1819.
43. The god, now fully evoked, is addressed in swifter, simpler,
more intimate argumentation. The voice speeds through the first
nine lines of Section IV, only recalling the power of cleave and
chasms in the linked pant . . . power . . . impulse, and the
note of wonder in 0, uncontrollable.
the voice now rings out on Be thou me, Drive and Scatter,
the imperative is still touched by the precatory. In line 64 the
imagination flashes for a moment back to line 2. Birth has a
contained vehemence.
66. Needs practice to combine clarity with speed.
68. Three ardent steps to the climax in line 69.
69 and 70. The famous appeal is difficult. The fervour of the
preceding lines passes into 0wind. I prefer a natural reduction
of pitch and intensity in the protasis; a slightly prolonged can,
to hint is it possible that?; and a rhetorical note that removes all
real interrogation from can Spring be far behind?
Many hours of thought now pass through rehearsal to a per-
formance lasting five minutes precisely. It is clumsy to explain
what one does rather than talks about. I will only defend the
process by saying that the final performance seems to me exactly
what is meant by on poiein-knowing by doing. Hogg has a
picture of Shelley in this very exercise:
He had a copy of the Grenville Homer, bound in russia,
in two volumes, the Iliad in one, the Odyssey in the other;
one of these volumes was continually in his hand. It would
be a curious problem to calculate how many times he read
the whole through. He devoured in silence, with greedy
eyes, the goodly and legible characters, often by firelight,
seated on the rug, on a cushion, or a footstool, straining
his sight, and striking a flame from the coals, with the
shovel, or whichsoever of the fireirons he could first seize
upon, remaining in front of the fire until the cheek next
to it assumed the appearance of a roasted apple. And he
would read some sublime passage aloud, if there was
anyone at hand to listen, with extreme rapidity, animation
and energy, raising his shrill voice until it equalled the
crowing of a cock; nor would he cease before he reached
the end of the book, and then closing it, he laid it gently
upon the ground, and lifting up his eyes to the ceiling, he
SPEAKING SHELLEY'S ODE TO THE WEST WIND 189