Analysis of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" (ePub)

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik/ Amerikanistik), course: Writing Couples, language: English, abstract: Percy Bysshe Shelley's work belongs to the Romantic period. One of his most famous poems is Ode to the West Wind, which he wrote in November 1819 while he lived in Florence with his family (Mullan xxxi). Shelley himself provides the title of the poem with a note:


This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions. (Webb 39)


This annotation helps to introduce the reader to the poem. What one gets to know from it are the place and the feeling for a certain kind of atmosphere when the poem was written. Shelley made this note to show that the landscape, the weather and the atmosphere have an influence on him while writing the poem.

That's what this ode is about and what you will get to know in more detail in this work. The ode will be analysed in respect to its special form of a sonnet, its stylistic devices and of course, connected with all this, its content.