Ode To The West Wind

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“Ode to the West Wind,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a poem which shows the speaker’s great desire to be the wind. The speaker believes that the wind is an extremely powerful part of nature which causes birth and death. Shelley emphasizes his want to be the wind by using complex literary devices. In “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley demonstrates his want to gain the power of the wind through his use of arrangement, symbolism, and figures of speech. Throughout his poem, Shelley uses a unique arrangement. “Ode to the West Wind” consists of five parts, each one being in terza rima. Terza rima, or "third rhyme," is an Italian rhyme scheme of ABA BCB CDC and so on. Additionally, each part is also an English sonnet that ends in a couplet. Shelley is making a combination between an Italian rhyme scheme and an English sonnet. This adds emphasis to his theme because Shelley is an English expatriate living in Italy, writing, at least in part, about how frustrating it is for him to feel totally out of sorts in a different country. The poem imagines one solution to an individual feeling weak in the face of the world: unity between Man and Nature. He wants to obtain that unity by becoming the wind. In addition, Shelley’s arrangement is logical. In the first three sonnets Shelley describes the power of the wind by presenting the effects the wind has on nature. He says, “Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead/ are driven... (2-3), /Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, / loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed…” (15-16). In the fourth sonnet, Shelley communicates the effects the wind would have on him. He writes, “If I were a dead leaf…/ If I were a swift cloud…” (43-44). In the final sonnet he beseeches to the wind to make him like the wind. He writes,”…Be thou me, impetuous one!” (63). By providing how the wind affects nature and
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