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SHELLEY - Ode Analysis
SHELLEY - Ode Analysis
and falling cadences have replaced the earlier harsher consonants. Towards the end of the stanza, however, a gloomier mood re-emerges and the scene shifts from the Mediterranean sea to the Atlantic Ocean, described in powerful and frightening terms, whose level powers cleave themselves into chaos and whose vegetation in the depths of the sea shakes as with fear. Stanza 4 describes the poets identification with the wind and introduces a more personal tone. He draws together the dead leaves of the first stanza, the clouds of the second and the power that the waves have, so that he could combat the evils he wanted to destroy. He speaks about his childhood when he ran after the wind, thus contrasting his past energy with his present misery. He feels that he has lost his boyhoods freedom, when everything seemed possible to him, and that the passing of the time has tamed and enslaved him. There is an echo here of Wordsworthian thought, but with a difference of emphasis: Wordsworth felt that he had lost the visionary spirit of childhood; Shelley is concerned with the loss of his personal physical and spiritual energy. Thats why he then asks the wind to help him regain the energy he has lost. Such a prayer reaches its climax in stanza 5, when he asks the wind to be his lyre, to renew him, to reanimate his spirit, so that his dead thoughts, blown about the universe, will come to new life, like the seeds blown with the dead autumn leaves. His message is one of hope for mankind: autumn heralds the approach of winter, representing death, but spring, representing the regeneration of mankind, will follow after. However, the very end of the poem is in a certain sense perplexing. We expect another exclamation but the poem closes with a question. Shelley is not quite so certain as his build-up suggested and at the final moment a doubt vexes his mind. Can regeneration arrive so mechanically?
Style
Formally, the ode is composed of five stanzas each consisting of a sonnet formed of four units of terza rima completed by a couplet. In terza rima, the verse form so brilliantly employed by Dante in his Divine Comedy, the first and the third lines rhyme and the rhyme sound of the second line is taken up by the fourth and sixth lines. This, by linking the stanzas to each other, grants a continuous movement forward which parallels the forward movement of the wind. The ode takes on the form of a prayer addressed to a divinity. The first three stanzas all conclude with the vocative Oh hear, but only from stanza 4 does the tone become more personal and the identity of the supplicant is revealed. In fact, as is common in prayers, the first half of the poem describes the attributes, both frightening and consoling, of the deity. The powers of the west wind are manifested through the seasons of the year as a destroyer, preserver and creator, and in the elements of nature on land, in the air and in the sea. Up until the fourth stanza there is no mention of
the supplicant, but in the final two stanzas the poet confesses his own frailties and implores the deity to make the poets work part of a spiritual awakening of a new year. Shelley acknowledges his need for a force beyond his own calculation to lift him and to disseminate a new gospel of hope. Always the divine power of the wind is stressed, for example through its identification as charioteer and enchanter, which emphasize its supernatural essence.