Shelley's Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 13 pages

Thirteen pages, and the most heavily apparatus-laden file in the section: the poem itself with *every line numbered*, followed by a section on the West Wind captured by Aeolian harps, a set of annotations printed as red notes, a commentary by Ian Lancashire dated 9 September 2002, a bibliography, and a closing piece headed "When the wind blows from the west a new world comes into being." A contents page at the front lists all six parts with their page numbers.

The poem is addressed to the wind as the breath of Autumn's being, from whose unseen presence the dead leaves are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing — yellow, black, pale and hectic red, called pestilence-stricken multitudes. The same wind that strips the trees also carries the winged seeds to their dark wintry bed, where they lie cold and low, each like a corpse within its grave, until the azure sister of the Spring blows her clarion over the dreaming earth and fills plain and hill with living hues and odours. That double office gives the first section its closing address and the phrase the whole ode turns on — Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere, destroyer and preserver, hear, oh hear. The second section moves the same action into the sky: loose clouds shed like earth's decaying leaves from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, angels of rain and lightning spread on the blue surface of the aery surge like the bright hair uplifted from the head of some fierce Maenad, and the wind itself called the dirge of the dying year, with the closing night as the dome of a vast sepulchre from whose solid atmosphere black rain and fire and hail will burst. Because the file carries a full commentary and bibliography as well as the text, it is the one to download by anyone who wants to study the poem rather than simply read it.

Read the full text (PDF, 0.8 MB, 13 pages)