Ode to the West Wind: Symbols

The West Wind

The symbolic importance of the west wind is, unsurprisingly, central to Shelley’s ode. For the speaker, the wind is more than the mere movement of air. The wind is also a spiritual force, an “unseen presence” (line 2) that, though not directly visible, nonetheless has enormous power to influence all aspects of the world. The speaker describes the wind’s universal influence in the first three cantos. In canto 1, they describe the wind’s importance to terrestrial life, serving as a mechanism for distributing seeds and enabling spring’s rebirth. In canto 2, they turn to the sky, emphasizing how the wind has the power to sculpt the aerial sphere and thereby shape the seasons. Finally, in canto 3, the speaker describes the wind’s capacity to agitate the sea and generate conditions for aquatic life. The wind’s influence on earth, sky, and sea makes it something of a god—the great regulator of the world that, as both “destroyer and preserver” (line 14), keeps life and death in balance. In addition to acting as the spirit of the natural world, the speaker also invokes the wind as a symbol for revolutionary transformation. In this way, the west wind is a representative of the proverbial “winds of change.”

Dead Leaves

In the opening canto, the speaker describes how the west wind blows dead leaves around in the autumn, redistributing them so that, come spring, their seeds can take root in new soil. Though apparently “dead,” these leaves become symbols for the revolutionary possibility of rebirth. The radical vision of renewal in the first canto plants a seed that, as it were, sprouts a new symbolic significance in the final canto. After describing the wind’s powerful influence over earth, sky, and sea, the speaker calls attention to the revolutionary message they need the wind’s help in spreading. They begin by recalling the image of the leaves from the first canto (lines 57–58):

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The reference to “leaves” here does more than just echo the leaves from the opening canto. As the speaker reveals themself to be a poet with a vision to share, the leaves mentioned here double as a reference to the sheaves of a pamphlet, or to the pages of a book. The speaker makes this symbolic link somewhat clearer a few lines later, when they conflate the “dead leaves” of canto 1 with their own “dead thoughts” (lines 63–64):

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!

Just as dead leaves lead to rebirth and renewal, so too will the speaker’s dead thoughts yield “a new birth.”

Previous section Motifs Next section Tone