Ode to the West Wind: Key Poetic Devices

Assonance, Consonance, and Alliteration

These three concepts are siblings, in that they all refer to the repetition of certain sounds in adjacent or nearby words. Assonance specifically refers to the repetition of vowel sounds, whereas consonance refers to the repetition of consonant sounds. Alliteration refers to the repetition of any sound at the beginning of adjacent or nearby words. Shelley uses all three techniques in concert throughout the poem, weaving a dense tapestry of language. To take just one small example, consider lines 39–40 from canto 3:

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean

For such a short passage, there’s a lot going on here sonically. Perhaps the first element readers will notice here is the wispy alliteration of “woods which wear.” Also easily noticeable is the assonance that arises from way Shelley stacks double O sounds in the words “sea-blooms,” “oozy,” and “woods.” The O sounds return in the second line, with the phrase “foliage of the ocean.” Less obvious but no less effective is the consonance that emerges through Shelley’s use of sibilant S and Z sounds across both lines: “sea-blooms,” “oozy,” “woods,” and “sapless.” Shelley further echoes this sibilance in the DJ and SH sounds at the end of the second line: “foliage of the ocean.” Similarly sonorous uses of assonance, consonance, and alliteration appear frequently throughout the poem.

Apostrophe

Apostrophe (uh-PAW-struh-fee) is a rhetorical device that occurs whenever a speaker directly addresses an absent person, or else an object or abstract entity. In Shelley’s poem, the speaker addresses an inanimate yet lively force: the West Wind. The speaker directly invokes the wind throughout the poem, including several times in the opening tercets (lines 1–6):

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,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The speaker begins with the conventional poetic invocation, which starts with the interjection “O.” At three points they also make use of the second-person pronoun “thou” to address the wind. In the fourth line, the speaker even combines these two forms of address: “O thou.” Elsewhere, the speaker repeatedly calls for the wind to listen to their plea, establishing a refrain that appears three times: “oh hear!” (lines 14, 27, and 42). The repetition of the speaker’s invocation indicates the urgency of their address. The speaker clearly believes in the revolutionary power of their poetic vision, and they have ambitions to see their words spread to every corner of the world. However, they also recognize their very human limits. As such, they plea with a much vaster power—the west wind—to help them spread their message.

Personification

Personification refers to a particular use of figurative language in which a poet or speaker attributes human qualities to a nonhuman or an inanimate object. From a certain perspective, personification is inherent in Shelley’s poem via the speaker’s address to the west wind. That is, they speak to the wind using “thou,” the familiar second-person pronoun. But personification occurs in other ways throughout the poem. For instance, in canto 1 the speaker describes the spring season as the west wind’s “azure sister” who “shall blow / Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth” (lines 9–10). Here, spring itself becomes a woman-like entity who awakens the world with the strident sound of “her clarion.” The speaker also personifies the earth itself in these lines, figuring the entire planet as a sleeping entity: “the dreaming earth.” Perhaps the most significant and sustained example of personification comes in the poem’s third canto, where the speaker describes “the blue Mediterranean” (line 30) as a human-like being who wakens from pleasant “summer dreams” (29), “lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams” (31). The overall effect of the poem’s personification is to generate a sense of the natural world as being alive and sympathetic with the speaker’s desire to spread their revolutionary message far and wide.

Simile

A simile (SIH-muh-lee) is a figure of speech that explicitly compares two unlike things to each other, typically using words such as “like” or “as.” “Ode to the West Wind” features an unusual number of similes, arguably making this form of figurative language the most important in the poem. The opening canto alone includes three distinct examples of simile. The first describes dead leaves being blown by the wind as being “like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing” (line 3). Shortly thereafter, the speaker notes how the wind blows these same dead leaves to “their dark wintry bed” (line 6), where they lie “each like a corpse within its grave” (8). However, spring eventually comes and awakens the seeds carried by the leaves, reanimating them and “driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air” (line 11). Over the course of the first canto, Shelley uses these three similes to trace a narrative of death and rebirth. Though united in their overall narrative effect, these similes are also distinct, conjuring varied images of enchanters, graves, and flocks of sheep. Here, as elsewhere in “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley’s uses similes to invest the poem with an evocative array of images and associations.

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