by Harold Bloom
“Ode to the West Wind”
WALLACE STEVENS mentions only two poets in his own verse: Walt Whitman and Shelley. Though he knew other poems by the revolutionary High Romantic, he manifests a perpetual indebtedness to Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” At the very beginning of the autumn of 1819, Shelley stands in a wood near the Arno River, close to Florence, and at sunset is caught in a violent burst of hail and rain, and what he calls “that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.”
I
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 wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
The dead leaves whirled along by the wind take on an apocalyptic tonality as they flee like ghosts from an exorciser. As I write, multitudes of Syrians are being driven to desperate exile, and they too suggest an end to a bad time, only to bring on a worse one. What Shelley actually sees are the dead leaves of autumn multicolored to no purpose, and yet his imagination is prophetic. The West Wind is hailed as a chariot in the tradition that goes from Elijah through Dante to Milton and William Blake, only to find a final parody in Shelley’s death poem “The Triumph of Life.” Astonishingly, the poet has a vision of wingèd seeds that will rise each from its grave when the Spring wind blows her clarion and calls the earth to resurrection. The Wild Spirit that is the West Wind thus both destroys and preserves. Shelley ends each of the first three terza-rima sonnets of his ode with the plea to be heard by the Spirit.
It is in the fourth sonnet that the prophet turns to his own personal dilemma:
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne’er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
Striving in what he is now willing to call a prayer, he implores, though knowing that he is no part of nature and, like Job, has fallen into the iniquity of abandonment by the Divine. And yet he proclaims his untamed pride and that swiftness of which he once remarked, “I go on until I am stopped and I never am stopped.” From this refusal to submit or yield there rises the magnificence of the final sonnet:
V
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
When teaching this poem, I try to emphasize the subtle interplay between “thy,” “my,” “thou,” and “me.” Shelley urges that he be a wind harp, like the forest, and with immense poignance defiantly cries out, “What if my leaves are falling like its own!” Tumult resolves into harmony, as much Shelley’s as nature’s “deep, autumnal tone” glances at Wordsworthian consolation. But there is nothing Wordsworthian about the high Pindaric apotheosis of “Be thou, Spirit fierce, / My spirit!” Wallace Stevens will ironize “Be thou me” in his “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” yet in admiration and not rejection.
Terrible sleeper as I am, I lie awake and chant to myself the concluding eight lines of Shelley’s ode. Shelley’s thoughts, scarcely dead, quicken a new birth, and with a justified sense of glory he becomes a nabi proclaiming the power to be gained by the reader through incanting the ode. The burning fountain of his own spirit is the unextinguished hearth that scatters sparks as well as ashes among mankind. There is a magic in the great assertion:
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The trumpet of a prophecy!
So indeed the ode has proved to be. At the close, Shelley asks an open question in the mode of the rhetorical questions that come at Job out of the whirlwind:
O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
A long winter is coming. Shelley places it in the reader’s own spirit as to how soon there will be spring.
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
“To a Skylark”
A YEAR AFTER WRITING “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley composed “To a Skylark,” a plangent farewell to his earlier sense that as a poet he could be the prophet of a Power concealed behind Nature. The reader should begin with the realization that the skylark is unseen when the poem begins. His flight is too high for visibility, and his song is just barely audible. Like Keats, Shelley also stresses his estrangement from the joy of the song, and conveys an ecstasy he knows he can no longer share:
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O’er which clouds are brightning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Keen as are the arrows
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there.
All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As when night is bare
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and Heaven is overflowed.
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds
there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
Lines 1–35
Shelley was an intellectual skeptic, more in the mode of the Roman poet Lucretius than that of David Hume, but he was highly conscious that head and heart diverged in his vision. His life and his poetry alike pulsated with a drive beyond all limits, and speed is the particular mark of his remorseless intensity. Yet he longed for the extraordinary and transcendental, and evolved an Orphic religion very much his own. His skylark is compared to “an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.”
The fourth and fifth stanzas of “To a Skylark” center on the silver sphere of the morning star. Shelley goes on to seek similitudes more for the song than for the bird:
What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.
Like a Poet hidden
In the light of thought,
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
Like a high-born maiden
In a palace-tower,
Soothing her love-laden
Soul in secret hour
With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:
Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aereal hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-wingèd thieves:
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
Lines 31–60
Poet, maiden in a tower, golden glow-worm, rose, and vernal showers as similes for the skylark’s song are knowingly inadequate though subtly suggestive. Confronting this imagistic impasse, Shelley mounts higher in a Pindaric pride of his own triumphal chant:
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest—but ne’er knew love’s sad satiety.
Waking or asleep,
Thou of death must deem
Things more true and deep
Than we mortals dream,
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?
Lines 61–85
The hidden lack of the poet boldly attempting to sustain a cognate joy is openly confessed by Shelley, whose erotic idealism invariably ended in sad satiety. It is a sudden leap that ascribes to the song a more profound and veracious apprehension of death than any we dream. Lancing into the unknown, Shelley concludes his ode with the only prayer possible for him:
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not:
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate, and pride, and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.
Better than all measures
Of delightful sound,
Better than all treasures
That in books are found,
Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!
Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then—as I am listening now.
Lines 86–105
The burden of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, his lyrical drama written in 1818–19, was best expressed by my revered mentor Frederick Albert Pottle: “The head must sincerely forgive, must willingly eschew hatred on purely experimental grounds,” while the heart “must exorcize the demons of infancy.” Shelley, revolutionary agitator though he was, had something angelic in his complex nature. His best friend, Byron, said of him, after his death by drowning at the age of twenty-nine, that everyone else he knew seemed a beast compared with Shelley. Bitter in his judgments, Byron relented only in regard to Shelley, who returned his affection and esteem. Scorn, hatred, and fear were alien to Shelley, fierce as he could be toward the oppressors of mankind. “To a Skylark” is one of the testaments to Shelley’s emancipation from the clogs that weigh most of us down.
Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Prometheus Unbound
ACT II OF Prometheus Unbound concludes with two transcendent lyrics, the first addressed to Asia, the bride of Prometheus, the second her own chant of transfiguration. In my interpretation, Asia is a kind of Wordsworthian image of human strength that remains provisional, since she participates in the beauty and love that hover perpetually just beyond the natural world and our limited senses. The Voice in the Air attempts to image her moment-of-moments, in which she becomes the heavenly Venus, but her transmembered form is imageless, and so the Voice fails in a luminous vertigo:
Life of Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between them;
And thy smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen them
In those looks, where whoso gazes
Faints, entangled in their mazes.
Child of Light! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide them;
As the radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds ere they divide them;
And this atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee wheresoe’er thou shinest.
Fair are others; none beholds thee,
But thy voice sounds low and tender
Like the fairest, for it folds thee
From the sight, that liquid splendour,
And all feel, yet see thee never,
As I feel now, lost forever!
Lamp of Earth! where’er thou movest
Its dim shapes are clad with brightness,
And the souls of whom thou lovest
Walk upon the winds with lightness,
Till they fail, as I am failing,
Dizzy, lost, yet unbewailing!
Lines 48–71
The art of this severe lyric turns on what cannot be held steadily in focus. Asia’s breath fires the cold air, and her limbs burn through the fleshly covering that cannot hide conflagration, even as daybreak lights up the atmosphere with another revelation that yet puts on another veil. You can feel
transmuted splendor but cannot see it. Lost in that powerlessness, you nevertheless see the earth and every common sight clad in a celestial aura. Lightened by that love to that high imagination, your will fails but with rejoicing.
Asia’s reply is my favorite among all of Shelley’s lyrics, partly because of its fecundity in his inheritors, from Beddoes and Browning through Swinburne and Yeats on to Hardy, Stevens, and Hart Crane, whose “Voyages” sequence stems directly from this:
My soul is an enchanted Boat,
Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
And thine doth like an Angel sit
Beside the helm conducting it,
Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing.
It seems to float ever—forever—
Upon that many-winding River,
Between mountains, woods, abysses,
A Paradise of wildernesses!
Till, like one in slumber bound,
Borne to the Ocean, I float down, around,
Into a Sea profound, of ever-spreading sound:
Meanwhile thy Spirit lifts its pinions
In Music’s most serene dominions,
Catching the winds that fan that happy Heaven.
And we sail on, away, afar,
Without a course—without a star—
But, by the instinct of sweet Music driven;
Till through Elysian garden islets,
By thee, most beautiful of pilots,
Where never mortal pinnace glided,
The boat of my desire is guided—
Realms where the air we breathe is Love,
Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,
Harmonizing this Earth with what we feel above.
We have passed Age’s icy caves,
And Manhood’s dark and tossing waves,
And Youth’s smooth ocean, smiling to betray;
Beyond the glassy gulfs we flee
Of shadow-peopled Infancy,
Through Death and Birth, to a diviner day,
A paradise of vaulted bowers,
Lit by downward-gazing flowers,