Summary of Ode To The West Wind

St Xavier’s College, Mahuadanr
Summary of the Poem “Ode to the West Wind”
“Ode to the West Wind” is a poem written by the English Romantic poet, Percy
Bysshe Shelley. According to Shelley, the poem was written in the woods outside
Florence, Italy in the autumn of 1819. In the poem, the speaker summons the West Wind
and predicts that a dark change is coming.
The poet is directing his speech to the wind by calling the wind 'destroyer and preserver’ as it
sweeps everything away and gets the dead leaves off of the trees, but it also is the preserver
because it helps them grow again in the springtime. It has the power to do all these as it takes
charge of the rest of nature and blows across the earth and through the seasons, able both
to preserve and to destroy all in its path. Hence, the destructive power of the West Wind
parallels Shelley’s fear that the beauty of the natural world, and metaphorically the beauty
of his own works, is doomed to oblivion by a hostile and insensitive force. At the same
time, however, he recognizes that the destructive power of the West Wind is but a part of
a larger cycle in which what seems like death is merely a necessary stage in the process of
regeneration that perpetuates life itself.
The wind takes control over clouds, seas, weather, and more. The poet offers that
the wind over the Mediterranean Sea was an inspiration for the poem. The wind becomes
a metaphor for nature’s amazing spirit. The speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” 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,” to 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 the
wind’s “wandering over heaven,” 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,” to be his own Spirit, and to drive
his thoughts across the universe, “like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth.” He asks
the wind, by the incantation (prayer) of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind,
to be the “trumpet of a prophecy.” Speaking both in regard to the season and in regard to
the effect of his words that he hopes to have upon mankind, he asks: “If winter comes,
can spring be far behind?”
Here the spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness,

imagination, liberty, or morality—all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring
about in the human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same
movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like
a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees. The thematic
implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature
as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed
nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience.
In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural
metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, significance, quality, and
ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.
By the final stanza, the speaker has come to terms with the wind’s power over him,
and he requests inspiration and subjectivity. He looks to nature’s power to assist him in
his work of poetry and prays that the wind will deliver his words across the land and
through time as it does with all other objects in nature.
The speaker treats the west wind as a force of death and decay, and welcomes this
death and decay because it means that rejuvenation (renewal) and rebirth will come soon.
In the final two sections of the poem, the speaker suggests that he wants to help promote
this rebirth through his own poetry—and that rejuvenation he hopes to see is both
political and poetic: a rebirth of society and its ways of writing.

Summary of Ode To The West Wind

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St Xavier’s College, Mahuadanr

Summary of the Poem “Ode to the West Wind”

Here the spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness,

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