comment-A Close Reading of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind-1 A Close Reading of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind

As stated in the above essay, Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind is both an exercise in personification as it is an exploration in what it means to be a poet. At the outset we are certain with the poet’s embodiment or potential embodiment in the wind: “The specific identity of the wind as a West Wind is an important detail because it is indicative of the poet’s state of suffering and confusion with regard to his understanding of the supernatural forces at work around him.” Yet all is contingent on the wind’s nature, what kind of wind it may be or rather come to represent in the poet’s imagination.

Callie brings up a good point in her rendering of the wind as an autumnal force responsible for “driving the dead leaves from the trees”. Dually, she calls our attention in the beginning of her essay to the wind’s inherent ability to summon winter and perhaps darker force quoting the lines 23-25|: “Thou dirge Of the dying year, to which this closing night Will be the dome of a vast sepulcher.”

After more fully considering the wind’s identity as a prelude to winter, I realized that Shelley’s genius lies in the wind’s indeterminacy. For while the latter lines remain a cold, hard fact of winter (excuse the pun), winter’s identity also presents a sense of cleansing, and resurrection. I would even go so far as to call the winter wind not far from a Blakean vision and his subsequent reinvigoration of a new world, a revived spirit. For winter in its most dismal state, also seems to me a place of clarity, frozen underneath layers of ice. A place of eternity and wonder, all is suspended in preparation for grandest spring. In fact, winter seems to me nature’s most significant season, for without it how can we truly enjoy spring? Such is the last line of the poem as Callie points to “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” Winter represents a power and force as filled with the spirit of revival and renewal as morning is to day. Perhaps this is what Shelley wishes himself as a poet to possess, an ability supernaturally endowed with eternal newness, at the apex of change (autumn) while similarly one step behind.