St Xavier’s College, Mahuadanr

“Ode to the West Wind” Themes

1. Death and Rebirth

Throughout “Ode to the West Wind,” the speaker describes the West Wind as a
powerful and destructive force: it drives away the summer and brings instead
winter storms, chaos, and even death. Yet the speaker celebrates the West Wind
and welcomes the destruction it causes because it leads to renewal and rebirth.

The West Wind is not peaceful or pleasant. It is “the breath of Autumn’s being.”
Autumn is a transitional season, when summer’s abundance begins to fade. So too,
everywhere the speaker looks the West Wind drives away peace and abundance.
The West Wind strips the leaves from the trees, whips up the sky, and causes huge
storms on the ocean. The West Wind turns the fall colors into something scary,
associated with sickness and death. The West Wind makes the clouds wild and
drunk. It creates chaos. Unlike its “sister of the Spring”—which spreads sweet
smells and beautiful flowers—the speaker associates the West Wind with chaos and
death.

Yet despite the destructive power of the West Wind the speaker celebrates
it—because such destruction is necessary for rebirth. The West Wind is both a
“destroyer” and “preserver.” The West Wind is able to merge these opposites
because death is required for life, and winter for Spring. In order to have the
beautiful renewal and rebirth that Spring promises, one needs the powerful,
destructive force of the West Wind.
2. Poetry and Rebirth

Throughout "Ode to the West Wind," the speaker praises and celebrates the
West Wind’s power—it is destructive, chaotic—and yet such destruction is
necessary for rebirth and renewal. Indeed, the speakers so admires the wind that he
wants to take, adopt, or absorbs the West Wind’s power into his poetry.

The speaker describes himself as a diminished person and he hopes that the
West Wind will revive him. But the speaker also proposes more complicated
interactions between himself and the wind. At one point, he asks the Wind, to
“make me thy lyre, even as the forest is.” In other words he wants to be a musical
instrument, specifically the lyre- the musical instrument that poets traditionally
play while they perform their poems.

The speaker wants to be the West Wind because he wants to create

something new, to clear away the old and the dead. Under the West Wind’s
influence, his “dead thoughts” will “quicken a new birth”—they will create
something living and new. The speaker doesn’t say exactly what new thing he hopes
to create. It might be a new kind of poetry. Or it might be a new society or a call for
political change. Either way, for the speaker, that newness can’t be achieved
through compromise with the old and dead; it can emerge only through cleansing
the destruction that the West Wind brings.