By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)
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,
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength…
Make me thy Lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone…
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Originally published in Prometheus Unbound, with Other Poems (1820) by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Public domain.
Analysis
Shelley invokes the wind as both natural force and political figure — “destroyer and preserver” — and asks to be swept into its music. The ode’s terza rima uncoils like gusts, chaining thought forward so the plea for renewal gathers weather behind it. Each conditional wish — leaf, cloud, wave — fails, and in that failure the poet discovers the true instrument: language itself.
The final movement turns lyric into action. If the forest can be a lyre, so can the mind; if winter is social paralysis, spring is revolutionary thaw. Shelley’s hope is not naïve but vocational — to cast words like sparks until the world takes fire. The famous question closes on promise without guarantee, a prophecy the reader must complete.