Ode to the West Wind

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1820

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Personal Freedom

The speaker of “Ode to the West Wind” sees unity with the wind as his chance to escape the shackles of his life. He craves the freedom he had as a child, when he and the wind indulged in aimless “wandering” (Line 49). Growing up means constantly learning new things and having new experiences, never staying in one emotional, physical, or mental state for too long. The young speaker was so used to change that to resist it “scarce seem’d a vision” (Line 51). Looking back, the speaker craves nothing more than to experience a life like the autumn wind: chaotic and destructive, but ultimately creative and invigorating.

The grown-up speaker is now “in sore need” (Line 52) of that release. Adult life, especially when compared to childhood, is characterized by constancy and routine. He is beset by problems, or “thorns” (Line 54), and he has no option but to lie where he has fallen and “bleed” (Line 54). The speaker also laments this constancy because he is, he says to the West Wind, “too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud” (Line 56). Of course, the clock can’t be turned back. The speaker will only grow older, adding more pounds to the “heavy weight of hours” (Line 55) that keeps him where he stands until he dies. However, if he becomes an instrument for the West Wind, he escapes the finality of death, becoming part of the eternal cycle of seasons.

Chaos and Creativity

The only constant feature of the West Wind is change. Under its influence, nothing can stay still or be the same. Leaves, seeds, clouds, oceans, and rain all shift from one state of being to another. In a way, this is a destructive force, moving its subjects from life to death. Summer, with all its greenery, smells, visions and colors, becomes the stark cold of winter. Plants die, seeds hide away, and visions of the ancient past are dashed. In another way, the West Wind exerts a creative force, moving its subjects from death into new life. The Mediterranean in the summer is like the dormant seeds in winter: quiet, stable, inactive. Waking life is rain and lightning, thunder echoing to the bottom of the sea.

The West Wind demonstrates that there is no creation without chaos. The West Wind brewing a storm carries “angels of rain and lightning” (Line 18). Angels serve divine entities, acting as liaisons between ordinary humans and the higher beings with the power to create and destroy. To a person, creation on a large scale can look like aimless chaos. Angels often appear to explain divine will to ordinary people, who otherwise lack the foresight and knowledge to understand these higher powers’ actions as anything other than destruction or chaos. An angel of lightning may seem plainly destructive, but such a harsh storm is necessary to usher in winter and then spring. Multicolored leaves and pollen-filled blooms blowing in the wind may appear frenzied and aimless, but they are necessary natural processes for the creation of new life.

Past Versus Future

When the wind stops blowing, the subjects of “Ode to the West Wind” begin to fixate on the past. The speaker takes Baiae’s bay as an example in the natural world. In the summer when the Mediterranean is calm, ancient Roman ruins are visible in the shallows of the bay, “quivering within the wave’s intenser day” (Line 34). These submerged “palaces and towers” (Line 33) covered in vegetation look “so sweet, the sense faints picturing them” (Line 36). The speaker himself is stuck in one place in his adult life, and he spends his time in bittersweet remembrance of his freer youth. Nostalgia captures the imagination of the speaker in Canto 4, to the point that he retreads many of the images and ideas about the wind he detailed in the previous three cantos. He repeats the same images—leaf, cloud, wave, leaf, cloud (Lines 43-45, 49-50)—over and over, suspending the poem in his despair. He escapes this pattern when he makes his request to become one with the wind.

When the West Wind blows, the subjects of the poem move into the realm of possibility and the future. Summer erupts into autumn, autumn abates into winter, and winter breaks into spring. When the speaker gives up on the idea of becoming a boy again, he is able to conjure a new image of the wind as his own spirit, and vice versa. Letting go of the past and surrendering to the West Wind, the speaker and the natural world are both finally able to look forward into eternity.