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Each of the poem’s five cantos uses the same interlocking rhyme scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE. As this outline shows, the rhyme scheme works by taking the last syllable of one tercet’s middle line and using that as the rhyme sound for the first and third lines of the following tercet. The name for this rhyme pattern is terza rima, which is Italian for “third rhyme.” The Italian poet Dante Alighieri invented terza rima around the turn of the fourteenth century. This scheme for interlocking triple rhymes became the engine for his epic religious allegory, The Divine Comedy. The subject matter of “Ode to the West Wind” has little to do with the theological journey undertaken in Dante’s great poem. Even so, Shelley likely used terza rima to honor the fact that he wrote his poem in a forest on the outskirts of Florence, which is the city where Dante was born and raised.

Just as he does when it comes to the poem’s meter, Shelley introduces a lot of variation in his use of rhyme. Most of the poem’s rhymes are exact, and most qualify as what scholars call “masculine,” meaning they occur on the final stressed syllable of the line. One example of exact, masculine rhyme can be seen in the B rhymes of the first canto: “dead,” “red,” and “bed” (lines 2, 4, and 6). Additionally, Shelley uses numerous partial or slant rhymes in the poem. For example, consider how “thou” (line 5) doesn’t quite rhyme with “low” and “blow” (7 and 9). A more extreme example occurs in the fourth canto, where the C rhymes are all slant: “even,” “Heaven,” and “striven” (lines 47, 49, and 51). Significantly, these last three rhymes are also examples of so-called feminine rhyme, which occurs between stressed syllables that are then followed by unstressed syllables: “e-ven,” “Hea-ven,” “stri-ven.” These different types of rhyme bring an additional layer of variation and complexity to Shelley’s use of terza rima.

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