Okay, first...stop rolling your eyes. This is a cool poem even if it has the word ode in the title. The speaker of the poem is talking directly to the wind. How awesome is that? I mean come on... a man talks to the wind today...we tend to lock him up before he pushes his shopping carts into a Mercedes while wearing a hat made out of tinfoil. HE'S TALKING TO THE WIND! That, BTW is called an APOSTROPHE in English Major Geek Speak. It's when the speaker directly addresses an absent or dead person, an abstract quality (like Happiness or Stinkiness), or something not human (like the WIND) as if the person, abstraction, thing were right there in front of you and able to answer back.
Here's a clue...poets love talking to things that can't answer back! (ANALOGY: Keats was to the Apostrophe as Air is to Life. "Nightingales," "Grecian Urns"). Anyway...back to Shelley...
The guy is talking to the wind. Everyone got that, right? He sets his ode in five stanzas (yeah, for the Roman-Numeral-challenged out there that's a V). Each stanza has a job. The trick to this poem is figuring out what each stanza is adding to the conversation. Let's look at stanza 1 or Roman Numeral I....hehehe
I.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autmn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes; O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
Okay...this is about as over the top Romantic style as one can get without colapsing into an emotional heap and sobbing (but wait we get there in line 54).
Let's begin with tone. This stanza is filled with words loaded with negative connotation: unseen presence, dead leaves, ghosts, enchanters, black, hectic red, pestilence, dark, wintery, corpse, grave (kind of overkill if you ask me)
Then, miraculously we get to the word "until" and the tone shifts through words like azure, Spring, dreaming, sweet buds, living hues, odors (the good kind), Wild Spirit, moving...
So what does it mean when a poet shifts tone like shifting gears in a truck? It means the poet is setting us up for contrasting ideas. He gives us something spooky then twists it a little and we see, "Oh, not so Spooky." It's this contrast of ideas that he works the poem toward.
Let's look at some specific diction:
"O" there it is, sports fans. The Romantic (capital R) Poets' favorite friend. The expostulation of emotion. One simple letter of the alphabet, yet that one letter carries so much...well...you say it out loud and people usually ask you, "What's wrong." So we can ask Shelley, "Dude, what's wrong?" (Keats loved the "O", BTW...from "Ode on a Grecian Urn"..."O mysterious priest,"..."O Attic shape"... from "Ode to a Nightingale"..."O, for a draft of vintage"..."O, for a beaker full of the warm South"...) Maybe one of the requirements of writing an Ode is to use the letter O!
Anyway, something IS wrong with the speaker of this poem. He's in awe of the Wind's Power. Look at the nice paradox he creates in the last line... "Destroyer and preserver". You may ask youtrself how something can be a destroyer AND a preserver at the same time. Shelley notes that the unseen wind drives the multitude of dead leaves and seeds into the ground. Then through the use of a lovely simile compares them to dead bodies in their graves. That wold be the destroyer part. But then, the result of dead leaves fertilizing the ground and seeds being planted is in the Spring, things are reborn. Preserved.
If you're looking for more figurative language in play here, there's lots of personification and a few similes..."like a ghost"..."like flocks"...
Then he ends with a pretty strong command: "hear, O, hear!" Repetition is not enough. Using an exclimation point IS NOT ENOUGH. He gives you repetition, an exclamation point AND another "O"! Shelley mellows in the next two stanzas by reducing his command to simply, "O, hear!" Then he drops it for stanzas 4 & 5. I guess he figures if the wind ain't listening by now...what's the point.
So we can say that the job of the first stanza is to
1) Get the wind's attention (and in so doing...get the readers' attention)
2) Set up this cool 'opposites thing' by using a shifting tone and
3) Introduce the idea that the wind can be both a destroyer and a preserver (in otherwords if the WIND had a Facebook status...it would be "It's complicated"!)
Here's the fun part. Rather than telling you what I think he goes on to talk about in the rest of the ode, try seeing if you can decipher Shelley's syntax to discover what other cool things he is saying abotu the powers of the Wind. Then see if you can figure out the figurative language tricks he's using. (HINT: there's an Allusion to greek mythology...did you see it?)
Stanza IV (4 for our Roman-Numeral Challenged readers) we see soemthing new. Shelley is begining to make a summary just like writing an essay. "If I were a dead leaf"..."If I were a swift cloud"..."A wave" all eternal questions right up there with "If I had a hammer..." Then we get to that awesomely pathetic, Romantic line 54..."I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" Probably the most sentimental outpouring if blatant emotion inthe history of writing in the English Language (Except maybe Lady Gaga singing "I love my life, I love this record and Mi amore vole fe yah".)
The last stanza gives us another shift. Shelley's speaker no longer sees himself as some passive object the wind is manipulating, but rather he gives us a lovely metaphor about being an instrument through which the wind may help him spread the awesomeness of his poetry. That's hot! He ends with trumpets of prophecy and poetry like sparks igniting the world! AGHHHHHH. I need a minute...
Okay, Shelley just has that effect on me I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment