Q.S. Critically comment on Shelley’s treatment of nature in his poem “Ode to the West Wind”.
Or,
Consider Shelley as a poet of nature with reference to his poem “Ode to the West Wind”.
Ans. Nature or love for nature is one of the dominant themes in the romantic poetry. The Romantic poets differed significantly from one another in their treatment of nature. Despite their profound love of nature, they looked at her from their own viewpoints. Like other Romantic poets, Shelley is also an ardent lover and worshipper of nature. Almost all his poems abound in nature imagery and some of his poems are poems purely of nature, such as “Ode to the West Wind”, “The Cloud”, and “To a Skylark”. In “Ode to the West Wind”, Shelley takes a powerful force from nature, the West Wind and renders it a mythical stature. Despite his subjective treatment of the natural object, Shelley does not attribute any human characteristics on it. To him, nature is a ceaseless source of inspiration and power.
Shelley’s love for nature has got clear manifestation in the poem “Ode to the West Wind”. His fascination for the mighty power of the West Wind is evident throughout the poem. He gives graphic descriptions of the forceful aspects of the wind. He brings out the duality in the wind — a ‘destroyer’ and a ‘preserver’ simultaneously. By means of images taken from nature, Shelley graphically describes the changes that the West Wind brings on the earth, in the sky and over the ocean. On the earth, it destroys the old leaves but carries and scatters ‘winged-seeds’ to the wintry beds where they wait for their germination in the spring. In the sky, it drives the clouds and causes storm and rain which sings together the dirge of the dying year. It also puts the waves of the sea in agitation. It arouses from its sleep the prodigious Mediterranean. It cleaves its way through the level Atlantic so that the vegetation at its bottom is disturbed. The sea flowers grow pale with fear and drop their petals. The descriptions allude to Shelley’s fascination for forceful aspects of nature.
To Shelley, forces of nature possess redeeming quality. They have the power to bring about revolutionary changes. He looks upon the West Wind as a great phenomenon of nature endowed with great power to rid human beings of their pain and agonies. This is why he turns to the West Wind and makes a fervent appeal to liberate him from the present decrepit condition:
“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.”
Shelley desires to share the strength and impulse of the West Wind. He has lost his youthful energy and has fallen upon the ‘thorns of life’. He is crushed by the circumstances of life. He voices his faith that the wind can restore his lost energy and impart its strength to him. In the last stanza, Shelley directly and explicitly asks the West Wind to make him an instrument and tool of revolutionary change:
“make me thy lyre” and “drive my dead thoughts over the universe”. The poem ends optimistically — “0, Wind/ If Winter comes can Spring be far behind?”
Shelley personifies the West Wind and gives it an independent life. He also personifies the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, giving each a separate existence. These forces of nature are so vitally imagined that they become presence. This giving of individual life to different forces of nature is Shelley’s myth-making quality. He gives conscious life to the West Wind, Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, but he does not attribute any other human qualities to them. He does not look upon nature or natural phenomenon as disguised beings. Nature does not teach him any moral lesson. To Shelley, the West Wind is still a wind, and the cloud a cloud, however intense a reality they might be for him. In his poetry, they keep their own character and do not take on human attributes. Shelley stands quite aloof in his subjective treatment of nature.
THE SYMBOLIC SIGNIFICANCE IN SHELLEY’S POEM
Bring out the symbolic significance of the West Wind in Shelley’s poem “Ode to the West Wind”?
On the surface, the West Wind in Shelley’s ode is the autumnal wind called Affricus. But Shelley has made it a potent symbol, a vehicle of his revolutionary romanticism. The wind is deified as a double agency of destruction and preservation, of new life alter decay and death, of a spring at the end of the winter.
It is the onset of the autumnal West Wind and its violent impact on the land, in the sky, and on the seas which the poet uses as his descriptive frame. In a series of vivid images, Shelley describes the various activities of the West Wind. It is a ‘destroyer and preserver’ at the same time. It scatters the dry leaves of the tress as it sweeps through the forest in Autumn. It also carries the winged-seeds, as if on a chariot, and deposits them in the cold underground soul, where they remain buried throughout the Winter and germinate in the Spring. In the sky, the Wind causes great commotion. It carries the loose masses of clouds making the entire space from the dim horizon up to the highest point in the sky overcast with these black clouds. These clouds bring thunder, rain and lightning in their wake. The mighty influence of the West Wind is also felt on the sea. It arouses the sleeping Mediterranean from its slumber. As the wind blows with its vigorous force, the ruined tower and palaces under the water app ear clearly visible through the shining water of the sea. As it blows violently over the surface of the Atlantic, deep hollows are produced in the waves. Even the underwater vegetation — the sea-weeds tremble with fear of the West Wind and shed their leaves and flowers. Through optical images the poet establishes the West Wind as a great force.
But the visual images of the wind’s operation and the poet’s contemplation’s more and more emphasize the spiritual character of the wind, the wind as symbolic of universal commotion effecting a change from degeneration to regeneration. On the land, the wind scavenges the earth’s floors to drive away all the dead leaves, and simultaneously, carrying the seeds of new life to their ‘dark wintry beds’ only to germinate at the call of the vernal wind. In the sky, the wind blows all over to produce a Bacchanalia inviting thunder showers to mark the end of autumn. The wind passes over the ‘mighty Atlantic’ to usher in a seasonal change at its bottom. The mighty force of the West Wind, through its various activities on land, in the sky and on the sea, brings changes. It is a great instrument for change. It is a vehicle of change that brings changes in the natural world.
For Shelley, the West Wind is more than a wind. It is not only a natural phenomenon affecting changes in the natural world. It is Shelley’s symbol for regeneration, a vehicle of his revolutionary romanticism. It is an uncontrollable spirit who can rescue and elevate the poet, fallen among ‘the thorns of life’, to become the harbinger of the great agency of change. In ‘Make me thy lyre’, Shelley implores the wind, and urges it to bring forth a new spring of life in the dead winter of man’s world.
