Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!                                                                                                               I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed                                                                                       One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

Ans.(4) The quoted lines occur in the celebrated poem “Ode to the West Wind” by the great Romantic poet P. B. Shelley. These lines reveal Shelley’s sensitive nature, his feeling of sheer helplessness, his bitter sense of his own weakness and his own lack of strength and freedom in the face of the trials and tribulations of life.

Shelley was a rebel and a revolutionary. He had a restless temperament which was ever at war with something. In the West Wind Shelley finds a kindred spirit looking at it, he is remained of his youth when he too was free and uncontrollable At that time he did not think it an impossibility to vie with the West Wind in its speed. But the worries, ordeals, persecutions, tribulations and suffering, all these miseries of life have compelled him to become tame and weak. He had lost his old vigour and force; and in this bitterness, he cries out to the West Wind to render him some help as he yearns for freed om and happiness. He appeals to the wind to lift him as it lifts a cloud, a wave or a leaf. He confesses his weakness that now he falls upon the thorns of life, miseries and misfortunes of life; and they prick him to bleeding. The poet here envies the free and swift movement of the wind and most of all, its untamed, powerful and uncontrollable, wild force. With the passage of time, as his bright and rosy days are over, he finds himself chained and restricted in every possible way.