Ode to the West Wind is a Plea for Poetic Inspiration essays

Ode to the West Wind is a Plea for Poetic Inspiration essays With "Ode to the West Wind," Percy Bysshe Shelley presents a poetic prayer filled with musical metaphors and themes of death, rebirth, inspiration, and liberation. The poem possesses dynamic language to convey the formidable forces of the West Wind, an autumnal energy "whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven," (2-3). The leaves refer not only to the literal leaves off trees but also to leaves of paper, on which Shelley conveys his messages to the world. "Ode to the West Wind" is largely a plea for both personal and universal transformation. The West Wind transforms the natural world, killing off all that is dead and decaying and making room for the "sweet buds" of Spring and the New Year (11). So too can the "breath of Autumn's being" drive Shelley's "dead thoughts over the universe," (63). Through his poetry, and renewed and revitalized by universal energy, Shelley hopes to awaken and enlighten a sleeping world. Musical metaphors link with the central images of wind and air, for Shelley refers exclusively to wind-dependent instruments: the lyre, the clarion, and the trumpet. Moreover, the poet ends the first three sections with a plea, "oh hear!" "Ode to the West Wind" evokes and lauds the West Wind as a tangible and ephemeral force affecting the both the natural world and the In the first section of the ode, Shelley refers to "winged seeds" which "lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave," (7-8). Winged seeds signify airborne potency, new life and rebirth, as seeds contain the blueprint for new life and their wings carry them through the air onto new soil. Seeds are born from flowers nearing decay; carried by the wind they float and fall, finding their way into organic graves beneath the ground. There they lie like corpses in a cold, dark womb of earth. Experiencing a symbolic death, the seeds hearken to the clarion call of spring, which awakens a ...