Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. 1880–1918.rnVol. IV. The Nineteenth Century: Wordsworth to Rossetti
Percy Bysshe Shelley (17921822)Ode to the West Wind
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: Oh hear!
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,
So sweet the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean know
And tremble and despoil themselves: Oh hear!
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision,—I would ne’er have striven
Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?