comment-Triptych for Ode to the West Wind-key-1 Triptych for Ode to the West Wind-key

Your E1 did indeed shine a spotlight on the retreat of Shelley’s narrator from direct address of the west wind to a more formal, more religious, less distinct ‘thou.’ In that regard, a triptych makes a good deal of sense: it suggests formality, reflects the progression of Ode to the West Wind as a series of stages, and sets up a climactic emphasis on the final stanza.

By settling on a triptych, you convey the sense of unfolding and revelation in Ode to the West Wind. Though you don’t say this outright, the project suggests that Ode to the West Wind retains a religious element even now; its developing succession of stanzas are at once a record of veneration and, in their formal perfection, an object of veneration.

Four out of the five stanzas aren’t much remapped, aside from being separated from each other and surrounded by colors and shapes. That could be a function of the untouchable quality of Shelley’s ‘wings,’ or you could have just not figured out how to remap such text. At any rate, the contrasting fifth stanza, with its broken-apart text, does contrast vividly with these other panels, and indicates that Ode to the West Wind’s deepest worship is reserved for a process of scattering. Even here, though, you don’t break the text apart much; I wonder why.

The triptych format introduces a few problems for you, ones that are elided in the project key. Though your E1 puts emphasis on the narrator’s mounting desperation, and regards the last two stanzas as a turn towards self-consciousness, nothing in the triptych conveys this reading. From the E1: “By the fourth section, Shelley’s greater point, whose presence was intimated early on with the transparency of the wind metaphor, emerges. The poet’s presence in these lines is much more explicit, and it begins to overtake the wind as the primary focus of the poem.” But in the project, stanza 4 is on the same level as stanza 3 – and each of these are separated from 1 and 2. This emerging self – and its final devotion to prophesy - seems quite ignored by the triptych.

I’m also struck by your choice to make the artwork on the project so abstract. The key gives no reason for this, and I’m tempted to guess that you chose abstract collage for its relative ease. At any rate, this technique seems at odd with the poem’s specificity in imagery. Quick example: stanza one assigns specific colors to leaves: yellow, black, red. None of these colors are on the panel; instead, you’re emphasizing a different autumn, “the browning of the earth that occurs with the arrival of autumn.” Stanza 4’s repetition of leaf, cloud, wave all gets swept away by one color, blood red. Does Ode to the West Wind really invite such competing or excising representation? I’d be open to an argument that it does; but you haven’t pitched one, and without this the superimposition of (fairly untouched) stanzas seems strangely at odds with your idiosyncratic and abstract graphics.

In sum, an interesting but also puzzling remapping, one that foregrounds Percy Bysshe Shelley’s mixture of form and dispersion in Ode to the West Wind, but seems to underplay the poem’s inward turn as well as its investment in specificity.