Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822; pronounced ['pɜːsi bɪʃ 'ʃɛli]) was one of

the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyrical poets of the
English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West
Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems
including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of
Life. Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical
voice, made him a notorious and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next
two or three generations of poets (including the major Victorian poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and poets in other
languages such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy). He was also admired by such persons as
Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt and George Bernard Shaw. He is famous for his association with
contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron; an untimely death at a young age was common to all three.
He was married to the famous novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, and wrote the introduction
to the 1818 edition of the novel.

Life
Education and early works

Shelley was the son of Sir Timothy Shelley, later the 2nd baronet of Castle Goring, and his wife
Elizabeth Pilfold. He grew up in Sussex, and he received his early education at home, tutored by Reverend
Thomas Edwards of Horsham. In 1802, he entered the Sion House Academy of Brentford. In 1804,
Shelley entered Eton College, and on April 10, 1810 matriculated at University College, Oxford. His first
publication was a Gothic novel, Zastrozzi (1810), in which he gave vent to his atheistic worldview through
the villain Zastrozzi. In the same year, Shelley, together with his sister Elizabeth, published Original
Poetry by Victor and Cazire. Whilst at Oxford, he issued a collection of verses (perhaps ostensibly
burlesque but quite subversive), Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. A fellow collegian,
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, is thought to have been his collaborator.

In 1811, Shelley published a pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. This gained the attention of the
university administration and he was called to appear before the college's fellows. His refusal to repudiate
the authorship of the pamphlet resulted in his being sent down (expelled) from Oxford on March 25, 1811,
along with Hogg. The re-discovery in mid-2006 of Shelley's long-lost 'Poetical Essay on the Existing State
of Things', a long, strident anti-monarchical poem printed in Oxford, gives a new dimension to the
expulsion, reinforcing Hogg's implication of political motives ('an affair of party').[1] Shelley was given the
choice to be reinstated after his father intervened, on the condition that he would have had to recant his
avowed views. His refusal to do so led to a falling out with his father.

Married life

Four months after being expelled, the 19-year-old Shelley travelled to Scotland with the 16-year-
old schoolgirl Harriet Westbrook to get married. After their marriage on August 28, 1811, Shelley invited
his college friend Hogg to share their household, which included his wife. When Harriet objected,
however, Shelley abandoned this first attempt at open marriage and brought her to Keswick in England's
Lake District, intending to write. Distracted by political events, he visited Ireland shortly afterward in
order to engage in radical pamphleteering. Here he wrote the Address to the Irish People and was seen at
several nationalist rallies. His activities earned him the unfavourable attention of the British government.

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Over the next two years, Shelley wrote and published Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem. The poem
shows the influence of English philosopher William Godwin, and much of Shelley's interpretation of
Godwin's freethinking radical philosophy is voiced in it. Although Queen Mab is dedicated to Harriet,
trouble already loomed in their relationship. Unhappy in his nearly three-year-old marriage, Shelley often
left his wife and child (Ianthe Shelley, 1813-76) alone while he visited Godwin's home and bookshop in
London. It was here that he met and fell in love with Godwin's intelligent and well-educated daughter,
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, known to the world as Mary Shelley. Mary was the daughter of Mary
Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Mary Wollstonecraft had had an
affair with Godwin, was briefly married to him, and died a few days after giving birth to Mary in 1797.

On July 28, 1814, Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child to elope with a 16-year-old for the
second time. In fact, he managed to catch two 16-year-olds at this time: when he ran away with Mary, he
also invited her step-sister Jane (later Claire) Clairmont along for company. The threesome sailed to
Europe, crossed France, and settled in Switzerland. The Shelleys would later publish an account of this
adventure. After six weeks, homesick and destitute, the three young people returned to England. There
they found that William Godwin, the one-time champion and practitioner of free love, refused to speak to
Mary or Shelley.

In the autumn of 1815, while living close to London with Mary and avoiding creditors, Shelley produced
the verse allegory Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude. It attracted little attention at the time, but it has now
come to be recognized as his first major poem. At this point in his writing career, Shelley was deeply
influenced by Wordsworth's poetry.

Introduction to Byron

In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary made a second trip to Switzerland. They were prompted to do
so by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had commenced a liaison with Lord Byron the previous
April just before his self-exile on the continent. Byron had lost interest in Claire, and she used the
opportunity of meeting the Shelleys as bait to lure him to Geneva. The Shelleys and Byron rented
neighbouring houses on the shores of Lake Geneva. Regular conversation with Byron had an invigorating
effect on Shelley's poetry. While on a boating tour the two took together, Shelley was inspired to write his
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, often considered his first significant production since Alastor. A tour of
Chamonix in the French Alps inspired Mont Blanc, a difficult poem in which Shelley pondered questions
of historical inevitability and the relationship between the human mind and external nature.

Shelley, in turn, influenced Byron's poetry. This new influence showed itself in the third part of Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, which Byron was working on, as well as in Manfred, which he wrote in the autumn
of 1816. At the same time, Mary was inspired to begin writing Frankenstein. At the end of summer, the
Shelleys and Claire returned to England. Claire was pregnant with Byron's daughter, Allegra Byron, a fact
that would have an enormous impact on Shelley's future.

Personal tragedies and second marriage

The return to England was marred with tragedy. Fanny Imlay, Mary Godwin's half-sister and a member of
Godwin's household, killed herself in late autumn. In December 1816, Shelley's estranged wife Harriet
drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London. On December 30, 1816, a few weeks after
Harriet's body was recovered, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married. The marriage was intended, in
part, to help secure Shelley's custody of his children by Harriet, but it was in vain: the children were
handed over to foster parents by the courts.

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The Shelleys took up residence in the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire where a friend of Percy's,
Thomas Love Peacock, lived. Shelley took part in the literary circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and
during this period, he met John Keats. Shelley's major production during this time was Laon and Cythna, a
long, narrative poem in which he attacked religion and featured a pair of incestuous lovers. It was hastily
withdrawn after only a few copies were published. It was later edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam
in 1818. Shelley also wrote two revolutionary political tracts under the nom de plume of "The Hermit of
Marlowe."

Travels in the Italian peninsula

Early in 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England in order to take Claire's daughter, Allegra, to
her father Byron, who had taken up residence in Venice. Contact with the older and more established poet
encouraged Shelley to write once again. During the latter part of the year, he wrote Julian and Maddalo, a
lightly disguised rendering of his boat trips and conversations with Byron in Venice, finishing with a visit
to a madhouse. This poem marked the appearance of Shelley's "urbane style". He then began the long
verse drama Prometheus Unbound, which features talking mountains and a petulant demon who
overthrows Zeus. Tragedy struck in 1818 and 1819, when his son Will died of fever in Rome, and his
infant daughter Clara Everina died during yet another household move.A daughter, Elena Adelaide
Shelley, was born December 27, 1818 in Naples, Italy and registered there as the daughter of Shelley and
a woman named Marina Padurin. Some scholars speculate that her true mother was actually Claire
Clairmont or Elise Foggi, a nursemaid for the Shelley family. Other scholars speculate she was a
foundling Shelley adopted in hopes of distracting Mary after the deaths of William and Clara. However,
Elena was placed with foster parents a few days after her birth and the Shelley family moved on to yet
another Italian city, leaving her behind. Elena died 17 months later, on June 10, 1820.The Shelleys moved
around various Italian cities during these years. Shelley completed Prometheus Unbound in Rome, and he
spent the summer of 1819 writing a tragedy, The Cenci, in Livorno. In this year, prompted among other
causes by the Peterloo massacre, he wrote his best-known political poems: The Masque of Anarchy and
Men of England. These were most likely his most-remembered works during the 19th century. Around this
time period, he wrote the essay The Philosophical View of Reform, which was his most thorough
exposition of his political views to that date.In 1821, inspired by the death of John Keats, Shelley wrote
the elegy Adonais. The text of this famous poem can be found at [1]In 1822, Shelley arranged for James
Henry Leigh Hunt, the British poet and editor who had been one of his chief supporters in England, to
come to Italy with his family. He meant for the three of them—himself, Byron and Hunt— to create a
journal, which would be called The Liberal. With Hunt as editor, their controversial writings would be
disseminated, and the journal would act as a counter-blast to conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's
Magazine and The Quarterly Review.

Drowning

On July 8, 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while
sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. Shelley claimed to have met his
Doppelgänger, foreboding his own death. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with the
newly-arrived Hunt. The name "Don Juan", a compliment to Byron, was chosen by Edward Trelawny, a
member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle. However, according to Mary Shelley's testimony, Shelley
changed it to "Ariel". This annoyed Byron, who forced the painting of the words "Don Juan" on the
mainsail. This offended the Shelleys, who felt that the boat was made to look much like a coal barge. The
vessel, an open boat designed from a Royal Dockyards model, was custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. It
did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her "Note on Poems of 1822" (1839) that the design
had a defect and that the boat was never seaworthy.

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Many believe his death was not accidental. Some say that Shelley was depressed in those days and that he
wanted to kill himself, others that he did not know how to navigate, others believe that some pirates
mistook the boat for Byron's and attacked him, and others have even more fantastical stories. There is a
mass of evidence, though scattered and contradictory, that Shelley may have been murdered for political
reasons. Previously, at his cottage in Tann-yr-allt in Wales, he had been surprised and apparently attacked
by a man who was probably an intelligence agent. Details of this incident can be found in Richard
Holmes's biography, Shelley: The Pursuit (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1975).

In the days before he died, he was almost shot on two separate occasions. A British consul
defended the shooter from the first of these two incidents, keeping him from all legal consequence. As for
navigation, two other Englishmen were with him on the boat. One was a retired Navy officer and the other
a boatboy, who should have known how to navigate to the nearby coast at Livorno. They drowned with
Shelley, but an Italian boy who was also aboard did not drown. His identity, however, has remained a
mystery. The boat was found beneath the waves near the shore, and it was plainly seen that one side of the
boat had been rammed and staved in by a much stronger vessel. However, the liferaft was unused and still
attached to the boat. Had it been an accident, they would at least have tried to swim for the beach. To do
this, they most likely would have removed their clothing. However, the bodies were found completely
clothed, including boots. In his 'Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron', Trelawny noted that
the shirt that Williams's body was clad in was 'partly drawn over the head, as if the wearer had been in the
act of taking it off [...] and [he was missing] one boot, indicating also that he had attempted to strip.'
Trelawny also relates a supposed deathbed confession by an Italian fisherman who claimed to have
rammed Shelley's boat in order to rob him, a plan confounded by the rapid sinking of the vessel. A large
amount of cash and valuables was found untouched in the boat.

On March 28, 2006, a claim was made in a scholarly magazine at a University in the city of Kragujevac,
Serbia that there is enough evidence to accuse the British establishment of Shelley's assassination. [citation
needed]
Shelley had been under surveillance while in Britain from the days of his activism in Ireland, and it is
quite within the bounds of possibility that this surveillance continued while he was on the continent. His
growing popularity with the Chartist movement and residual fear of an English revolution in imitation of
the French, would have made him a possible target for British intelligence. The day following Shelley's
death, the Tory newspaper "The Courier" gloated "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been
drowned, now he knows whether there is a God or no." (See Edmund Blunden, Shelley, A Life Story,
London: Oxford University Press, 1965).

Shelley's body washed ashore, and later, in keeping with his unconventional views, was cremated
on the beach near Viareggio. "The Funeral of Shelley" (also known as "The Cremation of Shelley"), by
Louis Eduard Fournier, is an 1889 painting of the scene at Shelley's funeral pyre. Unfortunately, this
painting is known to be inaccurate for several reasons. In pre-Victorian times, it was an English custom
that women were not to attend funerals for reasons of health. Mary Shelley did not attend the funeral, but
she was featured in this painting, kneeling at the left-hand side of the canvas. Also, Trelawney, in his
account of the recovery of Shelley's body, records that "the face and hands, and parts of the body not
protected by the dress, were fleshless", and by the time that the party returned to the beach for the
cremation, the body was even further decomposed. In his graphic account of the cremation of Shelley's
body, he writes of Lord Byron's being unable to face the scene, and withdrawing to the beach.

Shelley's heart was snatched from the funeral pyre by Edward Trelawny; Mary Shelley kept it for the rest
of her life. Shelley's ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome under a tower in the city walls
with the inscription 'Cor Cordium' or 'heart of harmony'. The grave site is the second in the cemetery.
Some weeks after Shelley was put to rest Trelawny came to Rome and did not like the position of his
friend among a number of others and purchased what seemed to him to be a better plot near the old wall.

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The ashes were exhumed and moved to their present location. Trelawny purchased the adjacent plot and
over 60 years later his remains were placed there.A reclining statue of Shelley's body washed up on the
shore, created by the sculptor Edward Onslow Ford, can be found at University College, Oxford as the
centrepiece of the Shelley Memorial there.

Shelley in fiction

Julian Rathbone's 2002 novel "A Very English Agent", about 19th century government spy Charles
Boylan, carries a lengthy section on Shelley's time in Italy, in which Boylan tampers with Shelley's boat
on orders from the English government, thus causing his death. Rathbone though is at pains to state he is
"a novelist, not a historian" and that his work is very much a piece of fiction.He also makes an appearance
in Jude Morgan's 2005 novel Passion, along with Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, and a wealth of
other English Romantic figures, though the novel's main focus is the lives of the women behind the
famous poets: Lady Caroline Lamb, Augusta Leigh, Mary Shelley, and Fanny Brawne.Shelley appears in
Frankenstein Unbound by Brian Aldiss. The book is a time travel romance featuring Mary Shelley. There
was also a movie made, based on the novel, directed by Roger Corman and starring John Hurt and Bridget
Fonda, in 1990.Shelley also features prominently in The Stress of Her Regard, a 1989 novel by Tim
Powers which proposes a secret history connecting the English Romantic writers with the mythology of
vampires and lamia.He makes an appearance in the alternative history novel The Difference Engine, by
William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Only referenced in passing by another character, in this world he
doesn't drown in Italy, but lives to become a fierce critic (and perhaps saboteur) of Lord Byron's pro-
industrial 'Radical party' government, for which he is arrested, declared insane, and placed in a
madhouse.The events featuring the Shelley's and Lord Byron's relationship at the house beside Lake
Geneva in 1816 have been fictionalized in film, twice (1) A 1986 British production, Gothic, directed by
Ken Russell, and starring Gabriel Byrne, Julian Sands, and Natasha Richardson (2) A 1988 Spanish
production, Rowing with the Wind (Remando al viento), starring Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Hurley Both
these movies deal mostly with Mary Shelley's creation of the Frankenstein novel, while Percy tends to be
quite a minor character in both films

Advocacy of vegetarianism

Both Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley were strong advocates of vegetarianism. Shelley wrote
several essays on the subject, the most prominent of which being "A Vindication of Natural Diet" and "On
the Vegetable System of Diet".Shelley wrote: "If the use of animal food be, in consequence, subversive to
the peace of human society, how unwarrantable is the injustice and the barbarity which is exercised
toward these miserable victims. They are called into existence by human artifice that they may drag out a
short and miserable existence of slavery and disease, that their bodies may be mutilated, their social
feelings outraged. It were much better that a sentient being should never have existed, than that it should
have existed only to endure unmitigated misery."Shelley was a strong advocate for social justice for the
lower classes. He witnessed many of the same mistreatments occurring in the domestication and
slaughtering of animals, and he became a fighter for the rights of all living creatures that he saw being
treated unjustly.

Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley composed the poem "Ode to the West Wind" in 1819 and published it in 1820.
Some have interpreted the poem to be an expression of the speaker lamenting his/her current geolocation,
but at the same time rejoicing in the fact his/her written works will have influence over people in different
geolocations. More than anything else, Shelley wanted his message of reform and revolution spread, and

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the wind becomes the trope for spreading the word of change.The poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’ consists
of five stanzas written in terza rima. Each stanza consists of four triplets (ABA, BCB, CDC, DED) and a
rhyming couplet (FF). The Ode is written in iambic pentameter. The poem begins with three stanzas
describing the wind's effects upon earth, air, and ocean. The last two stanzas are Shelley speaking directly
to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him like a leaf, or a cloud and make him its companion in its
wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and spread them all over the world so that the youth are
awoken with his ideas.

Interpretation of the poem

The poem Ode to the West Wind can be divided in two parts: the first three stanzas are about the qualities
of the ‘Wind’; the fact that these three stanzas belong together can visually be seen by the phrase ‘Oh
hear!’ at the end of each of the three stanzas. Whereas the first three stanzas give a relation between the
‘Wind’ and the speaker, there is a turn at the beginning of the fourth stanza; the focus is now on the
speaker, or better the hearer, and what he is going to hear.

a.) first stanza

The first stanza begins with the alliteration ‘wild West Wind’. This makes the ‘wind’ “sound invigorating”.
The reader gets the impression that the wind is something that lives, because he is ‘wild’ – it is at that
point a personification of the ‘wind’ in the form of an apostrophe. Even after reading the headline and the
alliteration, one might have the feeling that the ‘Ode’ might somehow be positive. But it is not, as the
beginning of the poem destroys the feeling that associated the wind with the spring. The first few lines
consist of a lot of sinister elements, such as ‘dead leaves’. The inversion of ‘leaves dead’ (l. 2) in the first
stanza underlines the fatality by putting the word ‘dead’ (l. 2) at the end of the line so that it rhymes with
the next lines. The sentence goes on and makes these ‘dead’ (l. 2) leaves live again as ‘ghosts’ (l. 3) that
flee from something that panics them. The sentence does not end at that point but goes on with a
polysyndeton. The colorful context makes it easier for the reader to visualise what is going on – even if it
is in an uncomfortable manner. ‘Yellow’ can be seen as “the ugly hue of ‘pestilence-stricken’ skin; and
‘hectic red’, though evoking the pase of the poem itself, could also highlight the pace of death brought to
multitudes.” There is also a contradiction in the colour ‘black’ (l. 4) and the adjective ‘pale’ (l. 4).

In the word ‘chariotest’ (l. 6) the ‘est’ is added to the verb stem ‘chariot’, probably to indicate the second
person singular, after the subject ‘thou’ (l. 5). The ‘corpse within its grave’ (l. 8) in the next line is in
contrast to the ‘azure sister of the Spring’ (l. 9) – a reference to the east wind – whose ‘living hues and
odours plain’ (l.12) evoke a strong contrast to the colors of the fourth line of the poem that evoke death.
The last line of this stanza (‘Destroyer and Preserver’, l. 14) refers to the west wind. The west wind is
considered the ‘Destroyer’ (l. 14) because it drives the last signs of life from the trees. He is also
considered the ‘Preserver’ (l.14) for scattering the seeds which will come to life in the spring.

b.) second stanza

The second stanza of the poem is much more fluid than the first one. The sky’s ‘clouds’ (l. 16) are ‘like
earth’s decaying leaves’ (l. 16). They are a reference to the second line of the first stanza (‘leaves dead’, l.
2). Through this reference the landscape is recalled again. The ‘clouds’ (l. 16) are ‘Shook from the tangled
boughs of Heaven and Ocean’ (l. 17). This probably refers to the fact that the line between the sky and the
stormy sea is indistinguishable and the whole space from the horizon to the zenith being is covered with
trialing storm clouds. The ‘clouds’ can also be seen as ‘Angels of rain’ (l. 18). In a biblical way, they may
be messengers that bring a message from heaven down to earth through rain and lightning. These two
natural phenomena with their “fertilizing and illuminating power” bring a change.

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Line 21 begins with ‘Of some fierce Maenad ...’ (l. 21) and again the west wind is part of the second
stanza of the poem; here he is two things at once: first he is ‘dirge/Of the dying year’ (l. 23f) and second
he is “a prophet of tumult whose prediction is decisive”; a prophet who does not only bring ‘black rain,
and fire, and hail’ (l. 28), but who ‘will burst’ (l. 28) it. The ‘locks of the approaching storm’ (l. 23) are
the messengers of this bursting: the ‘clouds’.

Shelley in this stanza “expands his vision from the earthly scene with the leaves before him to take in the
vaster commotion of the skies”. This means that the wind is now no longer at the horizon and therefore far
away, but he is exactly above us. The clouds now reflect the image of the swirling leaves; this is a
parallelism that gives evidence that we lifted “our attention from the finite world into the macrocosm”.
The ‘clouds’ can also be compared with the leaves; but the clouds are more unstable and bigger than the
leaves and they can be seen as messengers of rain and lightning as it was mentioned above.

c.) third stanza

The question that comes up when reading the third stanza at first is what the subject of the verb ‘saw’ (l.
33) could be. On the one hand there is the ‘blue Mediterranean’ (l. 30). With the ‘Mediterranean’ as
subject of the stanza, the “syntactical movement” is continued and there is no break in the fluency of the
poem; it is said that ‘he lay, / Lull’d by the coil of this crystalline streams,/Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s
bay, / And saw in sleep old palaces and towers’ (l. 30–33). On the other hand it is also possible that the
lines of this stanza refer to the ‘wind’ again. Then the verb that belongs to the ‘wind’ as subject is not
‘lay’, but the previous line of this stanza, that says ‘Thou who didst waken ... And saw’ (l. 29, 33). But
whoever – the ‘Mediterranean’ or the ‘wind’ – ‘saw’ (l. 33) the question remains whether the city one of
them saw, is real and therefore a reflection on the water of a city that really exists on the coast; or the city
is just an illusion. Pirie is not sure of that either. He says that it might be “a creative you interpretation of
the billowing seaweed; or of the glimmering sky reflected on the heaving surface”. Both possibilities seem
to be logical. To explain the appearance of an underwater world, it might be easier to explain it by
something that is realistic; and that might be that the wind is able to produce illusions on the water. With
its pressure, the wind “would waken the appearance of a city”. From what is known of the ‘wind’ from the
last two stanzas, it became clear that the ‘wind’ is something that plays the role of a Creator. Whether the
wind creates real things or illusions does not seem to be that important.

It appears as if the third stanza shows – in comparison with the previous stanzas – a turning-point.
Whereas Shelley had accepted death and changes in life in the first and second stanza, he now turns to
“wistful reminiscence [, recalls] an alternative possibility of transcendence”. From line 26 to line 36 he
gives an image of nature Line 36 begins with the sentence ‘So sweet, the sense faints picturing them’. And
indeed, the picture Shelley gives us here seems to be ‘sweet’ (l. 36). ‘The sea-blooms’ (l. 39) are probably
the plants at the bottom of the ocean and give a peaceful picture of what is under water. But if we look
closer at line 36, we realise that the sentence is not what it appears to be at first sight, because it obviously
means ‘so sweet that one feels faint in describing them’. This shows that the idyllic picture is not what it
seems to be and that the harmony will certainly soon be destroyed. A few lines later, Shelley suddenly
talks about ‘fear’ (l. 41). This again shows the influence of the west wind which announces the change of
the season.

d.) fourth stanza

Whereas the stanzas one to three began with ‘O wild West Wind’ (l. 1) and ‘Thou...’ (l. 15, 29) and were
clearly directed to the wind, there is a change in the fourth stanza. The focus is no more on the ‘wind’, but
on the speaker who says ‘If I...’ (l. 43f). Until this part, the poem has appeared very anonymous and was
only concentrated on the ‘wind’ and its forces so that the author of the poem was more or less forgotten.

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Pirie calls this “the suppression of personality” which finally vanishes at that part of the poem. It becomes
more and more clear that what the author talks about now is himself. That this must be true, shows the
frequency of the author’s use of the first-person pronouns ‘I’ (l. 43, 44, 48, 51, 54), ‘my’ (l. 48, 52) and
‘me’ (l. 53). These pronouns appear nine times in the fourth stanza. Certainly the author wants to
dramatise the atmosphere so that the reader recalls the situation of stanza one to three. He achieves this by
using the same pictures of the previous stanzas in this one. Whereas these pictures, such as ‘leaf’, ‘cloud’
and ‘wave’ have existed only together with the ‘wind’, they are now existing with the author. The author
thinks about being one of them and says ‘If I were a ...’ (l. 43ff). Shelley here identifies himself with the
wind, although he knows that he cannot do that, because it is impossible for someone to put all the things
he has learnt from life aside and enter a “world of innocence”. That Shelley is deeply aware of his
closedness in life and his identity shows his command in line 53. There he says ‘Oh, lift me up as a wave,
a leaf, a cloud’ (l. 53). He knows that this is something impossible to achieve, but he does not stop
praying for it. The only chance Shelley sees to make his prayer and wish for a new identity with the Wind
come true is by pain or death, as death leads to rebirth. So, he wants to ‘fall upon the thorns of life’ and
‘bleed’ (l. 54).

At the end of the stanza the poet tells us that ‘a heavy weight of hours has chain’d and bow’d’ (l. 55). This
may be a reference to the years that have passed and ‘chained and bowed’ (l. 55) the hope of the people
who fought for freedom and were literally imprisoned. With this knowledge, the West Wind becomes a
different meaning. The wind is the ‘uncontrollable’ (l. 47) who is ‘tameless’ (l. 56).

One more thing that one should mention is that this stanza sounds like a kind of prayer or confession of
the poet. This confession does not address God and therefore sounds very impersonal.

Shelley also changes his use of metaphors in this stanza. In the first stanzas the wind was a metaphor
explained at full length. Now the metaphors are only weakly presented – ‘the thorns of life’ (l. 54). Shelley
also leaves out the fourth element: the fire. In the previous stanzas he wrote about the earth, the air and the
water. The reader now expects the fire – but it is not there. This leads to a break in the symmetry of the
poem because the reader does not meet the fire until the fifth stanza.

e.) fifth stanza

Again the wind is very important in this last stanza. The wind with his ‘mighty harmonies’ (l. 59) becomes
an artist or a Creator of sounds. At the beginning of the poem the ‘wind’ was only capable of blowing the
leaves from the trees. In the previous stanza the poet identified himself with the leaves. In this stanza the
‘wind’ is now capable of using both of these things mentioned before.

Everything that had been said before was part of the elements – wind, earth and water. Now the fourth
element comes in: the fire.

There is also a confrontation in this stanza: whereas in line 57 Shelley writes ‘me thy’, there is ‘thou me’
in line 62. This “signals a restored confidence, if not in the poet’s own abilities, at least in his capacity to
communicate with [...] the Wind”.

It is also necessary to mention that the first-person pronouns again appear in a great frequency; but the
possessive pronoun ‘my’ predominates. Unlike the frequent use of the ‘I’ in the previous stanza that made
the stanza sound self-conscious, this stanza might now sound self-possessed. The stanza is no more a
request or a prayer as it had been in the fourth stanza – it is a demand. The poet becomes the wind’s
instrument – his ‘lyre’ (l. 57). This is a symbol of the poet’s own passivity towards the wind; he becomes
his musician and the wind’s breath becomes his breath. The poet’s attitude towards the wind has changed:

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in the first stanza the wind has been an ‘enchanter’ (l. 3), now the wind has become an ‘incantation’ (l.
65).

And there is another contrast between the two last stanzas: in the fourth stanza the poet had articulated
himself in singular: ‘a leaf’ (l. 43, 53), ‘a cloud’ (l. 44, 53), ‘A wave’ (l. 45, 53) and ‘One too like thee’ (l.
56). In this stanza, the “sense of personality as vulnerably individualised led to self-doubt” and the
greatest fear was that what was ‘tameless, and swift, and proud’ (l. 56) will stay ‘chain’d and bow’d’ (l.
55). The last stanza differs from that. The poet in this stanza uses plural forms, for example, ‘my leaves’ (l.
58, 64), ‘thy harmonies’ (l. 59), ‘my thoughts’ (l. 63), ‘ashes and sparks’ (l. 67) and ‘my lips’ (l. 68). By
the use of the plural, the poet is able to show that there is some kind of peace and pride in his words. It
even seems as if he has redefined himself because the uncertainty of the previous stanza has been blown
away. The ‘leaves’ merge with those of an entire forest and ‘Will’ become components in a whole tumult
of mighty harmonies. The use of this ‘Will’ (l. 60) is certainly a reference to the future. Through the future
meaning, the poem itself does not only sound as something that might have happened in the past, but it
may even be a kind of ‘prophecy’ (l. 69) for what might come – the future.

At last, Shelley again calls the Wind in a kind of prayer and even wants him to be ‘his’ Spirit: he says:
‘My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!’ (l. 62). Like the leaves of the trees in a forest, his leaves will fall
and decay and will perhaps soon flourish again when the spring comes. That may be why he is looking
forward to the spring and asks at the end of the last stanza ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ (l.
70). This is of course a rhetorical question because spring does come after winter. The question has a
deeper meaning and does not only mean the change of seasons, but is a reference to death and rebirth as
well.

Conclusion

Poems like this one really have a prophecy for all of us and this prophecy helps us to think about the term
‘poetry’ itself. The Ode shows us that rebirth is something that can be fulfilled through spiritual growing.
The last few lines of the poem underline this thought and bring the topic of regeneration and decline to the
heart in a very explicit way.

Prometheus Unbound

There are two plays named Prometheus Unbound. Both are concerned with the torments of the Greek
mythological figure Prometheus and his suffering at the hands of Zeus.

Aeschylus

The first Prometheus Unbound was a sequel to Prometheus Bound, traditionally attributed to Aeschylus.
It depicted the release of Prometheus from his torments by Heracles. Unfortunately, it, and a third play,
Prometheus Pyrphoros, are lost. Certain fragments have survived, however, and from these we can glean a
general cast: Prometheus, a chorus of Titans and Hercules. In the appendix of James Scully and C. John
Herington's translation of Prometheus Bound it is hypothesized that the cast also included Earth and/or
Sky, as part of an elemental cycle across the entire trilogy.[1]

Shelley

The second Prometheus Unbound is a four-act play by Percy Bysshe Shelley first published in 1820. It is
inspired by Aeschylus's 'Prometheus Bound' and concerns the final release from captivity of Prometheus.

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However, unlike Aeschylus's version, there is no reconciliation between Prometheus and Zeus in Shelley's
narrative. Instead, Jupiter is overthrown, which allows Prometheus to be released. Shelley's play is closet
drama, meaning it was not intended to be produced on the stage. In the tradition of William Wordsworth
and the other poets creating what we now call Romantic Poetry, Shelley wrote for the imagination,
intending his play's stage to reside in the imaginations of his readers. Shelley wrote another play called
The Cenci at almost the same time - perhaps moving from one text to the other. This other play was meant
to be produced and has been done in New York[2] and elsewhere from time to time. What is remarkable
about Shelley writing both plays and at the same time is that while Prometheus Unbound is an exalted,
idealistic vision of a perfect bloodless revolution, The Cenci is a horror-stricken Macbeth-like drama of
injustice, showing that Shelley was not naive about the realities he sought to change through his writing.

Shelley's own introduction to the play explains his intentions behind the work. He defends his choice to
adapt Aeschylus' myth - his choice to have Jupiter overthrown rather than Prometheus reconciled - with:

In truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with
“ the Oppressor of mankind. The moral interest of the fable, which is so powerfully sustained
by the sufferings and endurance of Prometheus, would be annihilated if we could conceive of
him as unsaying his high language and quailing before his successful and perfidious
adversary. ”
Shelley compares his Romantic hero Prometheus to Milton's proto-Romantic hero Satan from Paradise
Lost.

The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is,
“ in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and
majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being
described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal
aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. ”
In other words, while Milton's Satan embodies a spirit of rebellion, that character is flawed because his
aims are not humanistic. In his Prometheus, Shelley seeks to create a perfect revolutionary in an ideal,
abstract sense (thus the difficulty of the poem). Shelley's Prometheus is also an improvement upon the
Jesus of both the Bible, Christian orthodox tradition (which Shelley despised - he was kicked out of
Oxford for publishing an atheist tract), as well as Milton's character of the Son in Paradise Lost. While
Jesus or the Son sacrifices himself to save mankind, this act of sacrifice does nothing to overthrow the
type of tyranny embodied, for Shelley, in the figure of God the Father. Prometheus resembles Jesus in that
both uncompromisingly speak truth to power, and in how Prometheus overcomes his tyrant, Jupiter;
Prometheus conquers Jupiter by "recalling" a curse Prometheus had made against Jupiter in a period
before the play begins. The word "recall" in this sense means both to remember and to retract, and
Prometheus, by forgiving Jupiter, removes Jupiter's power, which all along seems to have stemmed from
his opponents' anger and will to violence.[3] Prometheus, then, is also Shelley's answer to the mistakes of
the French Revolution and it's cycle of replacing one tyrant with another. Shelley wished to show how a
revolution could be conceived which would avoid doing just that, and in the end of this play, there is no
power in charge at all; it is an anarchist's paradise.

Shelley finishes his "Preface" to the play with an evocation of his intentions as a poet:

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 My purpose has hitherto been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of the more
“ select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; aware that,
until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of
moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger
tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. ”
Essentially, Prometheus Unbound, as re-wrought in Shelley's hands, is a fiercely revolutionary text
championing free will, goodness, hope and idealism in the face of oppression. The Epilogue, spoken by
Demogorgon, expresses Shelley's tenets as a poet and as a revolutionary:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

“ To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. ”

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