Imagery, Ideas, and Design in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" Author(s): Stewart C.

Wilcox Reviewed work(s): Source: Studies in Philology, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1950), pp. 634-649 Published by: University of North Carolina Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4172954 . Accessed: 01/02/2012 06:40
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IMAGERY, IDEAS, AND DESIGN IN SHELLEY'S ODE TO THE IVEST WIND

C. WILCOX By STEWART

The logic of imagery-in it lie the ideas of Shelley's most admired lyric, and the emotional realization of its structural scheme. The basic images of the wind, the leaf, and the winged seed; the connotative Christian, pastoral, and gothic comparisons, as well as the musical instruments (the clarion, the lyre, and the trumpet), are woven so masterfully into the design that their intricate relationships challenge belief. Although Stopford A. Brooke in his essay " The Lyrics of Shelley" does not wholly neglect ideas and figures in his fine studv of the ode, his emphlasisis upon form. His purpose, he says, is " to dwell on the uinconsciouslogic in arrangement." My own purpose here is to assimilate Brooke's criticisms, along with those of later critics, into a fuller account of the interrelationships of all threeform, ideas, and -imagery-so as to elucidate certain meanings and difficulties that have escaped attention.' If successful, this elucidation should make even clearer the nearly perfect artistry of the ode. The outstanding image of the poem is of course the Wind. As "the breath of Autumn's being " and a " Wild Spirit " in two phrases of the first stanza its symbolic value is indicated, but the initial emphasis is upon its natural aspects. Not until the last stanza does its mode of motion become fully symbolic. Shelley
1 Here I acknowledge my general indebtedness to the following: Stopford A. Brooke, " The Lyrics of Shelley," Studies in P'oetry (London and New York, 1907), pp. 168-75; Henry S. Patncoast, " Shelley's Ode to the West Wind," MLN, XXV (1920), 97-100; Walter Edwin Peck, Shelley His Life and Wot-k (Boston and New York, 1927), II, 152-58; Benjamin Kurtz, The Pursuit of Death (New York, 1933), pp. 202-208; I. J. Kapstein, " The Syinbolism of the Wind and the Leaves in Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind,'" PJ LA, LI (1930), 1069-79; Newman I. White, Shelley (New York, 1940), 2 vols.; C. C. Cunninghanm, Literature as a Fine Art (New York, 1941), passim; Riehard Harter Fogle, "The Imaginal Design of Shelley's 'Ode to the West Wind,'" ELH, 15 (1948), 219-26. See also Salvador Madariaga, Shelley and Calder6n (London, 1920), p. 16, who says: "The plan of the first four stanzas is typically Calderonian. Under the skilful and subtler development of Shelley, the familiar style of Calder6n's syninietric architecture is apparent.

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dwells upon its gentler ministrations in stanza three, but our primary impression is of onrushing power as in the beginning where it streams over the earth like a wild river, carrying the dead leaves before it. Its virtue as an image lies in the several values it can create. As a vehicle, wind offers possibilities of contrast as few images could, for the winds are of the four seasons, whose moods Shelley exploits for contrapuntal effects of both music and meaning. As agent the wind affects the leaves, which are an image of equal though different value. Both images have natural as well as symbolic import, but they are related through cause and effect. Puttting aside until later the figure of the leaves as " ghosts from an enchanter fleeing," let us look at their. implications as " pestilence-stricken multitudes," implications which carry us on into the third basic image, the winged seeds. We naturally think of diseased multitudes as people rather than leaves, an association Shelley undoubtedly means we should make.2 The subsequent comparison of the seeds to corpses within their graves which will rise when the zephyr of Spring " shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth " is a heavenly echo: " And after these things I saw four angels standing on the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth nor on the sea, nor on any tree." (Revelation, VII, 1.) As Mrs. Campbell has pointed out, the corpse comparison suggests Christian bodies rising from their graves on the day of resurrection, for their souls but sleep awaiting their final judgment.3 Seven years before composing the ode Shelley wrote a preliminary draft of it in Queen Mab:
Thus do the generations of the earth Go to the grave, and issue from the womb, Surviving still the imperishable change That renovates the world; even as the leaves Which the keen frost-wind of the waning year Has scattered. . . . All germs of promise. . . .

(V, 1-8)

In the notes to this passage Shelley himself gives his sources. Lines four through six are from the Iliad (VI, 146-49), whereas the first two are from the Bible:
Originally Shelley wrote " like fanjine-stricken multitudes." The MS of the ode is in the Huntinyton Libirary. See Peck, II, 154-55. 8 In Shelley and the Unromantics (London, 1924), p. 230. Shelley first wrote " Like a dead body in the grave, until. . . " Peck, II, 155.
2

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One generation passeth away and another generation conleth, but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth anid the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again aceording to his cireuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full; unto the place whence the rivers come, thither they return again.-Ecclesiastes, chap. 1.

The sources of Shelley's imagery of the wind and the leaves with their full symbolic significance have been ably set forth by I. J. Kapstein. One of the most important sources, he points out, is Holbach, from whom Shelley got his "conception of the continuous destruction and regeneration of life" which he " carried over into 'Queen Mab."' As early, then, as 1812, we find Shelley blending a materialistic concept of cyclicality with biblical imagery having the same idea though obviously bearing spiritual overtones. The point is important, for we shall later meet imagery in the ode drawn from the New Testament.4 Thus like many a poet before him-the Beowulf poet or Milton in Lycidas for example-Shelley frequently mingles Christian and pagan imagery. His method is to fuse the two conceptually through variation of metaphor as the variations play over an underlying image. In the first stanza of the ode, to take but one illustration, the pastoral is allied with the Christian through a figurative pun: "like flocks to feed in air," the previous " buds " connecting both associations by way of seasonal contrast with the natural image of the winged seeds. Heavy critical emphasis, therefore, needs to be put upon the organic relationships of the comparisons in the ode. Natural force, materialistic change, Christian, classical, gothic, and pastoral elements, all are interwoven. Whether this baroque richness and coloration appeals to critical taste is an important question. But before reaching judgment, we should fellow through the ode the progressive development of the conceptual images-the wind, leaf, and seed-which uniderlie its structure. In the beginning the West Wind drives the dead leaves before it, later carrying the winged seeds " to their dark wintry bed." The
4 Indubitable proof of Shelley's intimate knowledge and use of the Bible is in Mary's Journal, Oct. 30, 1819; White, Shelley, II, 234; Bennett Weaver, Touward the Understanding of Shelley (Ann Arbor, 1932), and " Shelley's Biblical Extracts: a Lost Book," Papers of the Michigan Academy, XX (Ann Arbor, 1935), 523-38.

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leaves and the seeds here are separate images. The second stanza compares the clouds to "earth's decaying leaves," and the third carries the leaf image forward through the " oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean," seaforests answering to the power of the West Wind while the waves cleave themselves into chasms. The waves are influenced directly by the wind, whereas the vegetation of the ocean-bottoms,as Shelley states in his scientifically true note to the passage, " sympathizes with that of the land in the change of seasons, and is consequently influenced by the winds which announce it." 6 In the first tercet of the penultimate stanza, he recapitulates to prepare for the personal supplication he is about
to make to the Wind: " If I were a dead leaf . . . a swift cloud . . . A wave. . . ." " The structural logic of the imagery has been

remarkably consistent. The leaf stanza, the cloud stanza, the wave stanza are repetitively summed up in the first lines of the fourth, and his personal supplication then reinforced through the three stanza-images in the line " Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! " If this is "unconscious logic in arrangement," the order is nevertheless worked out with the skill of a logician building an enthymeme. Shelley has not yet launched into his later identification of himself with the wind. But the implicit proposition that it is the Power of the Universe, a destroying and preserving spirit, runs like an undercurrent beneath the flow of poetical variation. And as a natural force working through the surface imagery the wind binds together the various leaf-comparisons. The leaf image, either itself or through metaphor, appears in all five stanzas and is troublesome. The difficulty is that whereas the wind blows the leaves and seeds separately before it in the first stanza, Shelley begs it in the last to drive his dead thoughts like withered leaves over the universe. Unless we are to assume that
"The botanical significance of Shelley's note makes clear the whole relationship of what he says at the end of stanza three. Evidently he had lower plant forms such as algae in mind, for " sapless " indicates that the plants had no xylem and phloem. (Some underwater plants do have a kind of sap.) Furthernmore, the price the plants often pay for producting spores is death since this phase is the last of their life cycle. I presume the phrase "grow gray with fear" means the plants lost their red or green color in this last phase. 6Richard Harter Fogle, "Empathic Imagery in Keats and Shelley," PMLA, LX[ (1946), 189, points out that this is perhaps the one truly empathic passage in Shelley's poetry.

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the seeds and the leaves are one here, it is the leaves only which are " to quicke;n a new birth." Has Shelley " telescoped " his two images, the seed and the leaf, and if he has, does the use of the dead ashes and the living sparks in the metaphorical variation of the hearth justify him? I confess that I have never been troubled aesthetically by this discrepancy, if it is one, evenithough it may be a technical lapse. Certainly it would have been easy for Shelley to amalgamate his images, especially since winged seeds in motion resemble flying leaves. Furthermore leaves suggest both fertility and decay, variously colored leaves in motion lend themselves better to the concretely pictorial than do even winged seeds. But since we can merely guess about this difficulty, let us go on to the seed image itself. Next to the wind the seed image is the most important in the poem, for it is related to his statements about the function of poetry, a subject implicit in the last stanza where the poet becomes a divine instrunment. Now the most significant passages in both the " Preface " to Prometheus and in A Defence of Poetry describe the function of poetry. Probably Shelley's clearest statement of his central belief is in the former, where he says his purpose has been
to familiarise the highly refined imagination of the more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful examples of mitoralexcellence; aware that until the nmind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life wlhich the uinconscious [i. e., not-knowving] passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness.

From Mab and the " Preface " Slhelley borrows the image for the ode, where the "winged seeds" of the first stanza reappear in the last in the simile comparing his dead thoughts to germinal "witliered leaves." The image again reappears in the Defence in a passage wlhichalmost paraphrases the last stanza of the ode:
[Dante's] very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie uncovered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with a lightning which has yet found no conductor. All higch poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, 'which conltained all oaks potentially. Veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inniost naked beauty of the ineaniing never exposed. A great poenmis a fountain for ever overflowin, w:ith the waters of wisdom and delight; anid after one person and one age has exhauisted all its divine effluience which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new

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relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.

Of particular interest in this impassioned paragraph is the eclectic synthesis of ideas. A great poem is like the Neoplatonic fountain, which symbolizes the relationship of the poet's mind to the divine, and then again a poem Neoplatonically emanates its effluence. The figure of the " seeds cast on the highway of life " is undoubtedly from the parable of the sower in Mark. But the most interesting idea of all is the oak-within-the-acorn concept, since we do not usually connect Shelley's imagery with Aristotelian metaphysics. This concept is the principle of form potential: matter is dynamic and evolves immanently toward its form. The futility of trying to find systematic consistency in Shelley's imagery could hardly be better illustrated than here, for usually he looks to a mythmaker like Plato in whom form is transcendental essence.7 Yet Aristotle's emphasis upon concrete multiplicity and especially his Ethics, which Shelley began a translation of when at Oxford, undoubtedy appealed to him.8 With this brief philosophic excursion as background, we may return to the seed image again. My previous remark that next to the wind it is the most important image in the poem is, I think, true. Yet the most important concept in the imagerv is the idea of form potential within the seed. It embraces not merely cyclicality-and the Wind, we should remember, is but one of the four winds of the seasons-but also the living principle informing matter in its changing cycle of degeneration and regeneration. An interesting minor variation of this cyclical concept I have, hlowever,so far neglected, Shelley's alliance of it with the gothic. In the words " Destroyer and Preserver " of the first stanza lurks Shelley's ambivalence, his horror of the destructiveness of the natural elements of earth contending with his faith in the ultimate triumph of eternal beauty and goodness. Sometimes his fears reveai themselves in morbi(dovertones, as in The Sensitive Plant
7 After independently writing this, I was heartened to find the following corroboration in Kurtz, The Pursuit of Death, p. 207: The ode " reads like a parable of Aristotle's central doctrine, and a summary of the doctrine reads like an exposition of the poem." Shelley seems also to be using this Aristotelian figure in " Ode to Liberty," 246-49, and Hellas, 887-91. Translation from Aristotle," MLN, LXI 8 See Carlos Baker, " Shelley's (1946), 405-406.

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written shortly after the ode, or in the earlier "H Hymn to Intelthat aroused from even terror, he associates " lectual Beauty where his reading in the gothic horror tales, with the moment when the shadow of Intellectual Beauty fell on him. In the ode is the same curiouis juxtaposition of the gothic and the spiritual: the West Wind, the breath (spirit) of Autumn's being drives the dead leaves like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing." The Wind of before it "' the last stanza is still figuratively an enchanter, for Shelley, now informed by its spirit, prays it " by the incantation " of his verse to regenerat;eman by scattering his words before it like ashes and sparks fronma hearth. The figurative and verbal resemblances through gotshic association and the Latin root cantare help unify the poem. They also help in another way. The hint of pale fear of the beginning, followed by the fearsome thunderstorm and the " gray " fear of the " oozy woods " of the second and third stanzas, is finally submerged in the triumphantly powerful optimism of the close. Thus Shelley's handling of these minor gothic elements is appropriate to the development of his structure, ideas, and imagery, being blended with them through metaphorical echo. Since, however, this brief discussion of the gothic connotations has anticipated let us go back to stanza two. the whole 10oem, the power of the wind over the The second stanza enmphasizes
skies through the image of " loose clouds . . . Shook from the tangled

boughs of heaven and ocean." The " tangled boughs " vaguely limn a huge tree looming over earth and shedding its leaves onto the river-like stream of air. The whole effect is a development from The Revolt of Islam:
the vast clouds fled, Countless and swift as leaves on autumn's tempest shed. (I, iv, 8-9)

Because the clouds form in the sky and ultimately reach the sea out of which they build themselves again, they also, like the leaves, become natural symbols. The bright hair of the Maenad makes a skilful metaphorical transfer from clouds as leaves and Angels to them as " locks " spread on the blue surface of the airy surge.9 The
"The peculiar appropriateness of metaphorically personifying the storm as a MaenLd has escaped comment. Maenads were madwomen who worshipped Dionysus (Bacchus), uttering their cry " Evoel Evoe! " in their intoxieated possession and wildly tossing tlleir hair about. In the poem both the leaves and the clouds are twofold vehicles, and both swirl before the wind, which far off is a storm that finally will burst into life-giving

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vexed question of whether the hair of the madwoman streams before or after her seems to me pointless, for, being figuratively the clouds themselves, it is "uplifted" as it is spread on the surface of the turbulence. In addition the upliftment is carried forward pictorially into the " vaulted " (arched) sepulcher-image of the last tercet. The Christian imagery of clouds as " Angels of rain and lightning " is also designed to take us toward the end, and the West Wind, a funeral dirge of the dving season, is contrapuntal to the Spring wind, a clarion call of resurrection in the first stanza. The " congregated might of vapors " suggests not only the vast structure of the dome, but also the clouds as flocks (grex, flock).'O This synthesis of pastoral and Christian imagery is like the parenthetical " Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air," except that the dissolution of the clouds contrasts with the springtime birth of the buds. Paradoxically, however, the disappearing clouds bring lifegiving rains, a fact that makes them a fitting image for the reconciliation of opposites. The same Christian overtones can also be heard in the previous word "{Angels." Like mighty spirits the clouds will wield their lightning swords of destruction, sending tremendous flashes beneath the darkness. In addition the " Black rain, and fire, and hail" which were the clouds remind us in their coloration of the leaves " Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red " being blown to their
rains. In one phase of the myth Dionysus himself was slain to join the deities of the lower world, a sacrifice originating in observing the decay of vegetation in winter so that spring growth could follow. (See the " Notes on Sculptiures" [probably of 1819], Julian Works, ed. Ingpen and Peck, Loindon, 1926-30, VI, 323, for a description of Maenads Shelley saw "probably on an altar to Bacchus....") These double- valued classical associations perfectly relate to the cyclicality of the vegetation in stanza one; to the thematic interweaving of mingled associations of beauty and tyranny (see below, n. 11) as well as the undersea woods' and blooms' despoilment of themselves in stanza three; and to the Adonais analogue (" A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift ") of the end of the penultimate stanza, which is discussed below. Since the vegetative cycle is introduced in the beginning and culminates symbolically in the end, these associations assist the thematic development by blending with it. " And multitudes of dense white fleecy 10 Cf. Prometheus, II, 145-57: clouds / Were wandering in thick flocks along the mountains / Shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind. . . . " Originally "Angels of rain and lightning," was " Those angels of strong lightning." See Peck, II, 156.

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wintry bed of dissolution. These forces expending themselves in their self-built sepulcher are in contrast to the conclusion of Shelley's earlier poem " The Cloud,,"althioughthe image-fantasy in this poem of the cloud already vanished from the blue dome of the air (cenotaph) is evidently the and laughiingsilenltly at its emptv tonmb source of the sepulcher comparison. In it the dome of the clouds' burial tomb)will ironically be supported, arched by (vaulted with) their own vapors. Hence when they dissolve so also will their vast vault, which will also ironically have become a cenotaph. Through its natural, pagan, and Christiain imagery the whole stanza fuses aerological description into symbolic unity. And as we read the rhythm grows quicker and stronger until it reaches its climax in the bursting elements. The incremenitaltempo is like Beethoven's in the Pastoral Symphony, which reaches a thunderous crescendo just before the peaceful scene after the storm. Shelley takes care to mentioniall four seasonsof the year in the ode, fall and spring in the first stanza, winter (wintry bed) in the first and last, aind summer in the third. Embodyiilg the same concepts as the previous two, the third is nevertheless a counterpoint of mellifluous melody. If one stands on a cliff near Naples overlooking the Mediterranean, he can actually see the clear currents lazily deflected iinto coiling curves by the rough bottom; or if he sails out beside the volcanic isle in the bay of Baiae, he can observe beneath the boat, as Shelley says in a letter to Peacock of December 22, 1818, " the ruins of its antique grandeur standing like rocks in the transparent sea." These ruiins,the " old palaces and towers " of Roman emperors, which they used in summer, are overgrown with seaplants that arouse Shelley's extraordinarily sensitive olfactory powers. By poetic license he speaks for the West Wind, which saw the "azure moss and flowers quivering" below, an image of unusually strong synaesthetic acconmpaniment: " So sweet the sense faints picturing them." I take it that an image of sight through transference, evokes an image of odor.1'
"I Of the live senses odor is the most difficult to appeal to in imagery. Here the effect 'borrows ' from beauty evoked visually. Since Shelley always relates beauty to Love, 0. W. Firkins' comment is especially interesting: "Odor was to him an acute form of that revelation or emanation of love which became to him the supreme fact in the economy of the universe" (Power and Elusiveness in Shelley, Minneapolis, 1937, p. 129). As White suggests (Shelley, II, 553), lines 35-36 here, like Epipsychidion 450-53, may

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Now the scene shifts to the mightier Atlantic, the wind reasserting its power by roughening it into chasm-like waves. Simultaneously " The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear The sapless foliage of the ocean " fearfully " despoil themselves " like trees shedding their leaves or clouds dissolving. The sapless foliage growing gray also contrasts with the moss and flowers seen through the clear blue water, emphasizing the difference in season, reasserting the wind's power, and integrating the imagery of this stanza with the first two. The contrapuntal melody of the first half of the third stanza has yielded to the picturesque, less colorful "Atlantic chasms" and "oozy woods " of the conclusion so that Shelley can reassert the strong power of the wind over the waters. As we have seen, its first terzine is summed up in the middle line of the fourth: " Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud ! " which is followed by the muchcriticized " I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! " and the attendant " self-pity " of the concluding couplet. Critics for the defense here have offered several arguments in extenuation of what others consider expression of unmanliness of character. Newman I. White says appropriately enough that " the general testimony " of Shelley's acquaintances and letters does not bear out this judgment of unmanliness, and that
have arisen from Shelley's memory of a meadow near 1 Prato Fiorito where the jonquils were so overpoweringly sweet he nearly fainted. Richard H. Fogle, " The Imaginal Design . . .," p. 223, skilfully points up the reconciled discordances and opposites of the theme of st. iii: "Change and reform, in their iconoclastic vigor, destroy good as well as evil, for in the fabric of society the two are inextricably interwoven. The exquisite calm of the blue Mediterranean must be rudely shattered, although it frames in its motionless and idealizing medium ('the wave's intenser day') the loveliest forins of the past. The mellow patina of the centuries has its own attractions. We must also consider that the scene is Baiae, with its mingled associations of social splendor, amenity, and injustice. These 'old palaces and towers,' spiritualized by their medium (itself an emblem of the perspective of Time), and softened by their clothing of Time and Nature, are almost overpowering to sensibility; 'so sweet the qense faints pic uring them.'" Shelley to Hunt, Dec. 22, 1818, supports the foregoing: "There are two Italies-one composed of the green earth and transparent sea, and the mighty ruins of ancient time, and aerial mountains, and the warm and radiant atmosphere which is interfused through all things. The other consists of the Italians of the present day, their works and ways."

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Over and above the actual depression of spirits it represents, it is unconception doubtedly augniented by two extern-al circumstances-Shelley's of the poet as destined to be unappreciated, like Chatterton; and an emotional reaction from a moment of intense lyric exaltation which makes the actual seem pitiful in contrast with the ideal.12

True as this may be, we should not overlook the fundamental idea which Shelley is developing. The fourth stanza is a prayer, a supplication to the Wind, resting upon the paradox that in weakness there is strength. In effect he says that his youthful optimism deceived him into believing he could " outstrip " the power symbolized by the West Wind. But now, bowed down by the circumstances of life and public indifference to his poetry, he is aware of
a power beyond himself. To unbind his " chained spirit"
13

he

must abandon the excessive self-confidence of his youth and yield himself up. Far from being unmanly and weak, Shelley is revealing a lack of pride which we do not often enough associate with him. This I believe the analogue in Adonais of this part of the ode helps make clear:
A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swiftPower A Love in desolation masked;-a can scarce uplift Girt round with weakness;-it The weight of the superincumbent hour. .

Recalling Chatterton, and of course, Keats whom he is elegizing, Shelley goes on in the next stanza of Adonais to speak of himself, in echoes from Hamlet and Cowper's Task, as " A herd-abandoned
12 T'he Best of Shelley (New York, 1932), p. 490. Cf. also his Shelley, II, 193, 280-81. 13 " A As Kurtz, heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed. . ." op. cit., p. 205, points out, this figure of the chained spirit dominated Shelley's imagination during 1819. Cf. " The winged words on which my soul would pierce / Into the height of Love's rare Universe, / Are chains of lead around its flight of fire-- / I palnt, I sink, I tremble, I expire! (Epipsychidion, 588-91). The reader's kinesthetic motor response to this last line, combined with his occidental distaste for revelation of " weakness " of any sort, is what makes the line senitimentally bathetic. Doubtless no earthly expression ever could be wholly adequate to Shelley's sublimation of his sensuous eniotionis into mystical unioni with his love-object. Comparable objections help explain the failure of the imagery in " I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! " Sometimes, however, it is critically useful to distinguish the justice of an idea from its expression; this is particularly true when thematic development rather than poetical value is at stake.

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deer struck by the hunter's dart." Both here and in the ode Shelley expresses " weakness," if by it is meant the bitterness which neglect arouses. Yet this note is overborne by what immediately follows in both poems. In the ode Shelley is inspirited with a larger power, in Adonais Keats is absorbedinto the eternal:
Dust to dust! but the pure spirit shall flow Back to the burning fountain whence it came.

We may object to Shelley's expression of self-pity in the ode-mostly because of its imagery, I think-but we should not isolate its significance from the rest of the poem. "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! " at once suggests Christ's crown of thorns, an association which may or may not be considered presumptuous depending upon the hardihood of the reader.14 With it, however, is blended another association, for the figure of " the thorns of life" probably owes a good deal to Second Corinthians, XII. After speaking of the man who " was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter," St. Paul continues:
Of such an one will I glory: yet of myself I vill not glory, but in mine infirmities. For though I would desire to glory, I shall not be a fool, for I will say the truth: but now I forbear, lest aIny man should think of me above that which he seeth me to be, or that he heareth of me. And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I shoiuld be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in miiy infirmiities, that the power of Christ
may in am rest weak, upoII then me. in I am Therefore strong. I take in pleasure in for infirmities, Christ's in sake: reproaches, for when I necessities, persecutions, distresses,

The phrase " thorn in the flesh "' is a biblical cliche Shelley must
1' For analogous passages see White, Shelley, I, 580-81, who traces this line back to one in Schubart's The WVanderingJew. In Shelley's creative act there may well have merged the associations of Cain and Christ, the Wandering IJew, the biblical passages cited below, as well as the suffering Dionysus, with whom Shelley's " pardlike Spirit " is affiliated. Likewise cf. Childe Harold, IV, x: " Meantime I seek no synmpathies, nor need; / The have torn me, thorns which I have reap'd are of the tree / I planted-they and I bleed: /I should have known wha.t fruit would spring from such a seed."

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have known in its context. Certainly it sets forth the paradox present in the ode itself. The thornisof crown and flesh, then, may well have merged in the thorn-of-life figure to include the ideas of martyrdon and the finding of strength in weakness through abandonment of pride. In saying to the Wind that circumstances have "chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud," Shelley is admitting his excessive dependence upon himself. Following the admission, he asks the Wind in stanza five to make him its instrument (" Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is "), and Wefind him halfway toward his fullest strength when the Power of the Universe will announce itself through his instrumentality as poet. Thus the last two-fifths of the ode progresses through organically developed ideas: statement of youthful optimism, followed bv the disillusion of maturity with its renunciation of pride, and concluding with diviine inspiration attained through yielding to universal power. Although the imagery of " I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" may be repellent to the tastes of some critics, I can see no abject lack of manliness in Shelley's admission of personal suffering. Furthermore, the concept of Christian-like humility moves forward to combine with the classical concept of furor poeticus with which it is both like and unlike. As a transition, therefore, the conclusion to the fourth stanza is conceptually appropriate, for it is the instrumental poet, who is addressing divine strength. Like Wordsworth and Byron, Shelley felt that the noon of his life had passed swiftly and that he had lived so intensely as to compress a whole lifetime into his short existence. Even the earlier "lymn to Intellectual Beauty " strikes this note:
The day becomes more solemn and serene is a harmony When noon is past-there In autumn, aind a lustre in its sky. . .

When he expostulates in the ode "What if my leaves are falling like its own! " he is carrying forward the imagery of the leaves in the forest, to which he compares himself, and hinting that like them with their seeds of rebirth he will survive in the poetry he bequeathes mankind. For of himself and the leaves he says to the West Wind:
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. . .

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This last line " Sweet though in sadness " is clearly related to one in the "Skylark" composed the next summer: "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." '6. In the " Skylark " Shelley's yearning for the ideal is fulfilled in the joy of the bird which becomes a symbol of the ideal spirit of poetry. Here in the "West Wind," though the mood of yearning aspiration is absent, is the same mixture of pleasure and pain. Like Poe, who felt sadness to be a necessary accompaniment of beauty, Shelley says in the Defence:
Sorrow, terror, anguish, de8pair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.. . . This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself. . .

Yet over against the sadness evoked by the infirmity of his decay, is his pleasurable awareness of the immortality of his ideals: " Drive my dead thoughts over the universe like withered leaves to quicken [hasten, make come alive] a new birth I " As a result of this awareness, an undertone of hope begins to surge beneath the rhythm:
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone-

His hope arises from his personal inspiration with the West Wind, which has now reached symbolic fullness as one aspect of universal godhead:
Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Vital with the onrushing strength of the Wind, he has momentarily merged his sense of personal identity and can hopefully continue " Drive my dead thoughts. . ." Here is that synthesis of life-indeath that is correspondent with the "true and deep " intuition " The Cloud " attains in its culmination " I change, but I cannot die." For the resolution of the paradoxthat dead thoughts can stimulate a new birth is the same as that which enables the dead leaves to quicken from their seeds in the spring. The conception beneath the variation of metaphor is that Shelley's poems, which are his
15 Both lines are outgrowth of Prometheus, II, ii, Semichorus II, where, as Asia and Panthea hearken to the nightingales, " Sounds overflow the listener's brain / So sweet, that joy is alnost pain."

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thoughts, contain form potential in the Aristotelian sense. Out of them will, he trusts, arise an era when man will realize the full fruits of what during Shelley's lifetime lay but in embryo in his idealisms of moral excellence. The unifying figure is the seedimage, the form potential, a metaphysical concept embodied in the concrete of the imagery. Yet the seed-image itself, constantly sustained by that of the wind, has given rise to various figures in the poem: the seed-bearing leaves, the clouds which form and dissolve, the sapless foliage despoiling itself fearfully before the herald of autumn. And so in the last stanza are brought into unity the metaphorical variations established previously through comparison. Moreover the informing power of the universe imaged in the West through Shelley himself, so that no longer Wind is individ-u1alized "girt round with weakness " he can be its instrument of triumphantly poetic an.nouncement:
Be through my lips to unawakened earth The trumpet of a prophecy! 0 Wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

No doubt lurks in the rhetorical question. It is the statement of a seer, for as he says in the Defence the poet's thoughts " are the germs of the flower and fruit of latest time." 16 But we are not dope with the imagery, for the figure of the trumpet returns us to the beginning of the last stanza. " There is a power," wrote Shelley four years before the ode,
by which we are surrounded, like the atmosphere in which some motionless lyre is suspended, which visits with its breath our silent chords at will... This power is God; and those who have seen God have, in the period of their purer and more perfect nature, been harnmonized by their own will to so exquisite a consentaneity of power as to give forth divinest melody, when the breath of the universal being sweeps their frame. (Essay on Christianity)

" Man is an instrument," Shelley also says in the Defence, "over which a series of external and internal impressions are driven, like the alternations of an ever-changing wind over an Aeolian lyre." The classical harp-figure, likewise a favorite with Coleridge, of course signifies poetical divinity. Clearly too the lyre looks back
1a Seven years before the ode Shelley adumbrated this deeply moral view in Proposals for an Association, where he says: "The analogies that we can draw from physical to moral topics are of all others the most striking."

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to the clarion of the beginning and forward to the trumpet of the end, unifying these musical images through classical and Christian association: the fourth kind of madness in Plato's Phaedrus with Apocalyptic rebirth. Again in the Defence Shelley says "the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness." The essav is but figuratively repeating imagery similar to that of the "unextinguished hearth," a felicitous variation of the basic idea of reawakening since we are to understand from this separate figure that the sparks will spring up like seeds and flame into life to regenerate man through the burning spirit of the poet's utterance. With mastery Shelley thus plays the changes on his basic concept of cyclicality. His images have sprung forth in a lyric which is itself potential formit will help quicken a new period of happiness for man after he has outlivedthe winter of his discontent. With all its subdued as well as its clearly heard overtones the intricate imagery is woven into symbolical wholeness so as to emphasize the " stress and interplay between the actual and ideal." 17 No slhort poem of course can hope to be relatively inexhaustible to contemplation like Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy. Still, the " Ode to the West Wind" is mythopoeic. It emerges from the larger vision of Prometheus and similarly embodies Shelley's belief in his high function as poet and his view of the world present and to come in relation to that function. The outcome of the ode is a monistic resolution, the constructive oneness of life and death.
University of Oklahoma.

17 Richard H. Fogle, The Explicator,

VI (October, 1947), 1.