Ode to the West Wind

"Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red": so the dead leaves go past, driven before the wind "like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing". Shelley wrote most of it in a wood beside the Arno, on an autumn day when a storm was gathering the rains. Through three sections the wind he calls destroyer and preserver tears at leaves, at clouds, at the Mediterranean asleep in its summer dreams, burying seeds so that ruin and spring arrive in one breath. Then the poem turns, and a young poet, far from England and almost unread, cries out that he has fallen upon the thorns of life and bleeds. What he asks for is astonishing: not comfort, but to become the wind's instrument, his dead thoughts driven over the universe like withered leaves to quicken a new birth. Each rhyme of the terza rima reaches forward into the next tercet, so the ode moves like a gale. It ends on a question so hopeful it has passed into proverb, and it lands because of all the dark it has blown through first.