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Essay on Ode to the West Wind P.B.Shelley
Essay On Ode On West Wind By Percy Shelley
Essay on Ode to the West Wind P.B.Shelley
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Brian Duong
Mr. Volding
English 4: 241-03
27 January 2013
Ode of Realization
“If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee...I would ne’er have striven/ As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need./ Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” (Ode to the West Wind/IV/page 752:44,51-53). The speaker displays great homage to the West Wind through his ode for it, stating he is lost with a dire need for the wind's assistance. However, the fact that the ode is for an inanimate force of nature, it is confusing why the speaker would tribute his ballad for a wind that has no control for his fate. With hopes to influence himself, Percy Bysshe Shelly presents an odd tale of realization through the presence of a speaker and the violent and wild West Wind.
As a destroyer and preserver, the West Wind has the power to influence the speaker with his ode towards it. The speaker addresses and appeals the West Wind as if it were a deity or spirit in the first few lines. The speaker states, “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being/ Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead/ Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing” (751:1-3). The speaker expresses the power of nature by including the presence of death while appealing to the West Wind as a breath of Autumn. By stating “unseen presence the leaves dead,” the speaker can indicate two references to death: one reference as actual leaves which have fallen off trees and died or another reference to the wind that leaves people for dead. By interpreting the wind to leave those who cross its path for dead, the unseen breath of the wind blows the leaves like ghosts running away from an enchanter. Though his comments on how the wind brings death can infer a negative connotation, the speaker ...
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...hat he does not have to worry about spreading his words or his thoughts being seen as “dead” and therefore makes his previous statements unnecessary.
In order to invoke the West Wind, the speaker tediously lists a series of actions the wind has done which illustrates it’s power: driving away the autumn leaves, the cyclical "death" of the natural world, and stirring up the seas and oceans. The speaker’s ode to the West Wind, is bigger and more powerful than it can be understood. The speaker’s description of the wind is especially powerful because it contains elements like the West Wind and the Spring Wind, which can travel invisibly across the globe, affecting every cloud, leaf, and wave as they go. Though the speaker never receives a response from the West Wind, he shows that man may be able to increase his status by allowing nature to channel itself through him.
Joan Didion’s description of various experiences with the Santa Ana winds conveys her message through various rhetorical strategies. Early in the essay the feeling of worry and anxiety is introduced by the use of words such as “uneasy” , “unnatural stillness” , and “tension”. Because the emotion is described early on the audience can grasp this feeling those who live and Santa Ana are experiencing. This feeling causes people to act abnormal, even when they have no awareness it is coming. Additionally the suspenseful emotion continues through the use of imagery, to convey the unusual effect the winds have on the atmosphere. Didion describes the sky, having a “yellow cast” and screaming peacocks in “the olive trees… by the eerie absence of surf”.
In this poem, Frost includes his fear of the ocean and exaggerates its destructive power. As Judith Saunders stated that “The first thirteen lines have depicted an ocean storm of unusual force, and through personification the poet attributes to this storm a malign purposefulness” (1). Frost provided human characteristics on the storm to help prove his point that the ocean has bad intentions and its only purpose is to hurt him. Frost does not describe the waves as a result of unfavorable weather; he explains them as having a malignant intention to destroy the world. This poem revolves around the forces of nature and could be included in the long list of nature themed poems by Robert Frost.
Yet as all younglings do, the hurricane drifted away from its progenitors. Borne upon its own winds, the hurricane whirled westward at speeds between 12 and 15 miles per hour (Longshore). It was like a newborn foal discovering its legs for the first time and thus altogether too eager to move of its own volition. A sense of wanderlust for the world infused the entity’s essence.
The wind becomes almost human like from its physically described features-- such as its hands-- that seemingly reach out to others as they pass by. Violently blowing through the street, the winds actions are given strong diction, such as “pried,”
It is understandable that nature would be cruel to those who challenge it, yet at times nature can be merciless. In the west, human inhabitants are forced to cope with nature’s harsh condition: “’I don’t get my gears turning smooth till it’s over a hundred. I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there wasn’t no shade.’” (16). The use of imagery describes the severity of nature and its lack of mercy, especially when stating that there was “no shade” to hide from the sun’s blinding rays.
Percy Bysse Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind is a dramatization of man’s useless and “dead thoughts” (63) and Shelley’s desire from the Autumn wind to drive these “over the universe” (65) so that not only he but man can start anew. The thoughts are first compared to the leaves of trees but as the poem progresses the thoughts are paralleled with the clouds and finally the “sapless foliage of the ocean” (40). Shelley personifies himself with the seasons of the Earth and begs the West Wind to drive him away thus allowing him to lost and become the very seasons. In the end Shelley’s metamorphosis is realized and he becomes the very wind and the power with which he humanized throughout the poem.
'[A]nd indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
The main concept which permeates the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson is that “the fundamental context of our lives is nature” (Richardson, Jr., Emerson and Nature 97). Emerson presents his theory of nature and its relation to man in three essays spanning almost a decade: Nature (1836), “The Method of Nature” (1841) and “Nature” (1844). There are many common threads connecting these works. One of the most notable is Emerson’s belief in the interconnection between all things – between all natural phenomena as well as between nature and the soul. Also, there exists behind and beyond Nature a Spirit from which all things originate. It is the invisible which gives rise to the visible and embodies truth and beauty. Bringing these two ideas together, Emerson shows how it is possible for man to access this unseen world through nature by using the faculties Nature has bestowed upon him. However, during the years spanning the production of these works, Emerson’s conception of nature changes. The result is three distinctive theories of nature which shift in tone from Nature’s idealism, to the disillusionment of “The Method of Nature”, to the pragmatism of “Nature”. With each piece, Emerson is asking different questions which illustrate the fundamental ways in which his characterizations of nature have been altered.
unchanged by man; the air, the river, the leaf” , is revised and satirized by
The wind seems to be a symbol of hope. Hope that he has entrusted in the form of nature. A hope that maybe he can trust that there is no such thing as a ghost that is lurking around tapping on his widows and chamber doors. The narrator looks for a way to make the wind the source of his problems instead of the potential cause that he is having repercussions from a broken
This poetic device aided the reader to visualize not only how silent and dead the leaves were, but also to perceive the atmosphere of the poem. In the poem “Time Does Not Bring
...za there is personification in the line, “the vapors weep their burthen to the ground”. There is also a sense of irony with, “man comes and tills the field and lies beneath” because its humans working the land for crops that help them survive, only to be buried beneath it when they pass away. In the second stanza, the God granting his wish is described by the smilie, “Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, like wealthy men who care not how they give”.
This is a metaphor comparing the poet’s voice to the wind. The poet uses these two metaphors to draw comparisons between himself and the
his own view that death should not be feared, as it has been since the
Both Shelley, in "Ode to the West Wind," and Wordsworth, in "Intimations of Immortality," are very similar in their use of nature to describe the life and death of the human spirit. As they both describe nature these two poets use the comparison of how the Earth and all its life is the same as our own human life. I feel that Shelley uses the seasons as a way of portraying the human life during reincarnation. Wordsworth seems to concentrate more on the stages that a person goes through during life. Shelley compares himself to such things as clouds, leaves, and waves. He is writing the poem as if he were an object of the earth, and what it is like to once live and then die only to be reborn. On the other hand, Wordsworth takes images like meadows, fields, and birds and uses them to show what gives him life. Life being what ever a person needs to move on, and with out those objects can't have life. Wordsworth does not compare himself to these things like Shelley, but instead uses them as an example of how he feels about the stages of living. Starting from an infant to a young boy into a man, a man who knows death is coming and can do nothing about it because it's part of life.