comment-A Close Reading of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind-3 A Close Reading of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind

This essay is beautifully attuned to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem – you seem to be quite comfortable with his unique blend of abnegation and triumph in Ode to the West Wind, and you end up making a convincing case for reading the poem as personal assertion. It’s a reading that’s open to argument, given the pleas and questioning that seem to dominate even up to the end of the fifth section. Nevertheless, your careful tracking of the shifting relationship that Percy Bysshe Shelley forges with the object of his address ends up selling your idea that the capacity of a poet to desire power, while divorcing him from natural force, invests him with a saving self-consciousness.

I was a little concerned heading into the paper that you wouldn’t put the spotlight firmly on address – the introduction doesn’t really highlight it, and the title is no help at all. But like the poem you’re looking at, your true subject gradually emerged. The tracking of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s generalizations and religious reframings of the wind is deftly done, and it’s especially nice that you connect this technique with William Wordsworth. You also use the repeated implorations to “hear” to good effect.

It helps you to acknowledge the “palpable desperation” in those notorious lines about falling on the thorns of life & bleeding – while at the same time setting up a “discovery” at the poem’s climax: a new role for the poem, a man making a powerful sacrifice of himself for mankind. The destructive power that you’ve tracked in the early part of the poem feeds into “the exemplary martyr,” as you succinctly put it,

Some greater specificity about this martyrdom would help at the paper’s end – does Percy Bysshe Shelley’s address to “the unawaken'd earth” hinge on his own destruction, or at least the destruction of his initial hope to in some sense be the wind? And what about Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ideal relationship to “mankind” at the end of the poem? What should we make of the fact that his words remain only indirectly pitched to us?

These are important questions, and you’ve found the way to them. Throughout your writing is clear and convincing. The essay is well-paced, and easily tackles the paradoxes that S often strews in his reader’s path. It’s a fine introduction to Ode to the West Wind, framing Percy Bysshe Shelley in the proto-Christian terms his ode invites.