Percy Bysshe Shelley- Ode to the West Wind

Shelley was born August 4, 1792. At the age of twelve he attended the Sion House Academy before entering University College Oxford. Organized education did not agree with Shelley’s philosophies and ideas and he was later expelled. He eloped with sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook to Scotland. The two had two children together before Shelley attempted to have an open marriage, which eventually cause his marriage to fail. In 1814 Shelley eloped again with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin who had her own famous work Frankenstein or Modern Day Prometheus. The most famous work of Percy Shelley is probably his poem “Ozymandias” which was published in 1818. What I emjoyed most about Shelley was not “Ozymandias” but another one of his popular poems “Ode to the West Wind”

Perhaps what drew me to this poem is the word “West.” I am from California and every time I say that, some one replies “All the way from the west,” it never fails. I cant “help where I come from I wasn’t born southern but I got here as fast as I could. There is something more vibrant about the west. I know that when Shelley wrote this poem he wasn’t thinking about the West Cost of the United States, but he was thinking of a vibrant force. Shelley was thinking of the wind. The wind is a driving force not only scattering leaves but also scattering lives. In this particular poem the “Wind” is the autumn wind. Autumn leads to winter, thus the wind is the ever-pressing force towards death and stillness. The speaker in the poem speaks about being a dead leaf carried on by the wind. This could mean having himself be carried though death. The speaker asks the wind to takes his thoughts across the universe, so that every intellectual mind will hear and understand. The speaker asks “If winter comes can spring be far behind.” This shows Shelley’s infatuation with nature and natural law. He relates the wind to the driving forces in ones life. The wind is what will support one even after death. This is a sort of moral and principle. Even after life has taken its course and ended in winter, the way one lived and conducted affairs, ones memory will live on. The wind is like the human sole, uncultivated and arrogant. The seasons are the physical something one cannot control. One’s sole remains intact even after the season has passed.