Ode to the West Wind
"Ode to the West Wind," Shelley invokes Zephyrus, the west wind, to free his "dead thoughts" and words, "as from an unextinguished hearth / Ashes and sparks" (63, 66-67), in order to prophesy a renaissance among humanity, "to quicken a new birth" (64). This ode, one of a few personal lyrics published with his great verse drama, "Prometheus Unbound," identifies Shelley with his heroic, tormented Titan. By stealing fire from heaven, Prometheus enabled humanity to found civilization. In punishment, according to Hesiod 's account, Zeus chained Prometheus on a mountain and gave him unending torment, as an eagle fed from his constantly restored liver. Shelley completed both his dramatic poem and "Ode to the West Wind" in autumn 1819 in Florence, home of the great Italian medieval poet, Dante. The autumn wind Shelley celebrates in this ode came on him, standing in the Arno forest near Florence, just as he was finishing "Prometheus Unbound." Dante 's Divine Comedy had told an epic story of his ascent from Hell into Heaven to find his lost love Beatrice. Shelley 's ode invokes a like ascent from death to life for his own spark-like, potentially firy thoughts and words. Like Prometheus, Shelley hopes that his fire, a free-thinking, reformist philosophy, will enlighten humanity and liberate it from intellectual and moral imprisonment. He writes about his hopes for the future.
A revolutionary, Shelley believed that poets exercise the same creative mental powers that make civilization itself. The close of his "Defence of Poetry" underlies the thought of "Ode to the West Wind":
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, thetrumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.
The trumpeting poetic imagination, inspired by sources
A revolutionary, Shelley believed that poets exercise the same creative mental powers that make civilization itself. The close of his "Defence of Poetry" underlies the thought of "Ode to the West Wind":
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, thetrumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.
The trumpeting poetic imagination, inspired by sources