Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792, into a wealthy Sussex family which eventually attained minor noble rank—the poet’s grandfather, a wealthy businessman, received a baronetcy in 1806. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a member of Parliament and a country gentleman. The young Shelley entered Eton, a prestigious school for boys, at the age of twelve. While he was there, he discovered the works of a philosopher named William Godwin, which he consumed passionately and in which he became a fervent believer; the young man wholeheartedly embraced the ideals of liberty and equality espoused by the French Revolution, and devoted his considerable passion and persuasive power to convincing others of the rightness of his beliefs

Shelley belongs to the younger generation of English Romantic poets, the generation that came to prominence while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were settling into middle age. Where the older generation was marked by simple ideals and a reverence for nature, the poets of the younger generation (which also included John Keats and the infamous Lord Byron) came to be known for their sensuous aestheticism, their explorations of intense passions, their political radicalism, and their tragically short lives.

Shelley died when he was twenty-nine, Byron when he was thirty-six, and Keats when he was only twenty-six years old. To an extent, the intensity of feeling

emphasized by Romanticism meant that the movement was always associated with youth, and because Byron, Keats, and Shelley died young (and never had the opportunity to sink into conservatism and complacency as Wordsworth did), they have attained iconic status as the representative tragic Romantic artists. Shelley’s life and his poetry certainly support such an understanding, but it is important not to indulge in stereotypes to the extent that they obscure a poet’s individual character. Shelley’s joy, his magnanimity, his faith in humanity, and his optimism are unique among the Romantics; his expression of those feelings makes him one of the early nineteenth century’s most significant writers in English.

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand ,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown ,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things ,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed .

And on the pedestal these words appear :"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings :

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair "!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away

Summary

The speaker recalls having met a traveler “from an antique land,” who told him a story about the ruins of a statue in the desert of his native country. Two vast legs of stone stand without a body, and near them a massive, crumbling stone head lies “half sunk” in the sand. The traveler told the speaker that the frown and “sneer of cold command” on the statue’s face indicate that the sculptor understood well the emotions (or "passions") of the statue’s subject. The memory of those emotions survives "stamped" on the lifeless statue, even though both the sculptor and his subject are both now dead. On the pedestal of the statue appear the words, “My name is

Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” But around the decaying ruin of the statue, nothing remains, only the “lone and level sands,” which stretch out around it.

Form “Ozymandias” is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is somewhat unusual for a sonnet of this era; it does not fit a conventional Petrarchan pattern, but instead interlinks the octave (a term for the first eight lines of a sonnet) with the sestet (a term for the last six lines), by gradually replacing old rhymes with new ones in the form ABABACDCEDEFEF.

Commentary

This sonnet from 1817 is probably Shelley’s most famous and most anthologized poem—which is somewhat strange, considering that it is in many ways an atypical poem for Shelley, and that it touches little upon the most important themes in his oeuvre at large (beauty, expression, love, imagination). Still, “Ozymandias” is a masterful sonnet. Essentially it is devoted to a single metaphor: the shattered, ruined statue in the desert wasteland, with its arrogant, passionate face and monomaniacal inscription (“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”). The once-great king’s proud boast has been ironically disproved; Ozymandias’s works have crumbled and disappeared, his civilization is gone, all has been turned to dust by the impersonal, indiscriminate, destructive power of history. The ruined statue is now merely a monument to one man’s hubris, and a powerful statement about the insignificance of

human beings to the passage of time. Ozymandias is first and foremost a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of political power, and in that sense the poem is Shelley’s most outstanding political sonnet, trading the specific rage of a poem like “England in 1819” for the crushing impersonal metaphor of the statue. But Ozymandias symbolizes not only political power—the statue can be a metaphor for the pride and hubris of all of humanity, in any of its manifestations. It is significant that all that remains of Ozymandias is a work of art and a group of words; as Shakespeare does in the sonnets, Shelley demonstrates that art and language long outlast the other legacies of power.

Of course, it is Shelley’s brilliant poetic rendering of the story, and not the subject of the story itself, which makes the poem so memorable. Framing the sonnet as a story told to the speaker by “a traveller from an antique land” enables Shelley to add another level of obscurity to Ozymandias’s position with regard to the reader—rather than seeing the statue with our own eyes, so to speak, we hear about it from someone who heard about it from someone who has seen it. Thus the ancient king is rendered even less commanding; the distancing of the narrative serves to undermine his power over us just as completely as has the passage of time. Shelley’s description of the statue works to reconstruct, gradually, the figure of the “king of kings”: first we see merely the “shattered visage,” then the face itself, with its “frown / And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”; then we are introduced to the figure of the sculptor, and are able to imagine the living man sculpting the living king, whose face wore the expression of the passions now inferable; then we are introduced to the king’s people in

the line, “the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.” The kingdom is now imaginatively complete, and we are introduced to the extraordinary, prideful boast of the king: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” With that, the poet demolishes our imaginary picture of the king, and interposes centuries of ruin between it and us: “ ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ode to the West Wind

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 5

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 10

(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, O hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,

15

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,

Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread

On the blue surface of thine airy surge,

Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 20

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 25

Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere

Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 30

Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers 35

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below

The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear

The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 40

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,

And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

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 45

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 50

Scarce seem'd a vision—I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd 55

One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.

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, 60

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,

Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;

And, by the incantation of this verse, 65

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Form

Each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” contains five stanzas—four three-line stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme in each part follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line rhyme scheme employed by Dante in his Divine Comedy. In the three-line terza rima stanza, the first and third lines rhyme, and the middle line does not; then the end sound of that middle line is employed as the rhyme for the first and third lines in the next stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of the last three-line stanza. Thus each of the seven parts of “Ode to the West Wind” follows this scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.

Commentary

The wispy, fluid terza rima of “Ode to the West Wind” finds Shelley taking a long thematic leap beyond the scope of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and incorporating his own art into his meditation on beauty and the natural world. Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role as both “destroyer and preserver,” and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into

a metaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that drives “dead thoughts” like “withered leaves” over the universe, to “quicken a new birth”—that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here the spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness, imagination, liberty, or morality—all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees. The thematic implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewed nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem, Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.

In "Ode to the West Wind," Percy Bysshe Shelley tries to gaintranscendence, for he shows that his thoughts, like the "winged seeds" (7) are trapped.  The West Wind acts as a driving force for change and rejuvenation in the human and natural world.  Shelley views winter not just as last phase of vegetation but as the last phase of life in the individual, the imagination, civilization and religion.  Being set in Autumn, Shelley observes the changing of the weather and its effects on the internal and external environment.  By examining this poem, the reader will see that Shelley can only reach his sublime by having the wind carry his "dead thoughts" (63) which through an apocalyptic destruction, will lead to a rejuvenation of the imagination, the individual and the natural world. Shelley begins his poem by addressing the "Wild West Wind" (1).  He quickly introduces the theme of death and compares the dead leaves to "ghosts" (3).  The imagery of "Pestilence-stricken multitudes" makes the reader aware that Shelley is addressing more than a pile of leaves. His claustrophobic mood becomes evident when he talks of the "wintry bed" (6) and "The winged seeds,where they lie cold and low/ Each like a corpse within its grave, until/ Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow" (7-9).  In the first line, Shelley use the phrase "winged seeds" which presents images of flying and freedom.  The only problem is that they lay "cold and low" or unnourished or  not elevated.He likens this with a feeling of being trapped. 

The important word is "seeds"for it shows that even in death, new life will grow out of the "grave."  The phrase "winged seeds" also brings images of religions, angels, and/or souls that continue to create new life.  Heavenly images are confirmed by his use of the word "azure" which besides meaning sky blue, also is defined, in Webster'sDictionary, as an "unclouded vault of heaven."  The word "azure," coupled with the word "Spring," helps show Shelley's view of rejuvenation.  The word "Spring" besides being a literary metaphor for rebirth also means to rise up. In line 9, Shelley uses soft sounding phrases to communicate the blowing of the wind. This tercet acts as an introduction and a foreshadow of what is to come later.

        Shelley goes on to talk of the wind as a "Destroyer and Preserver" which brings to mind religious overtones of different cultures such as Hinduism and Native Indian beliefs.  The poem now sees a shift of the clouds which warns of an upcoming storm.  This helps Shelley begin to work towards a final climax.He then writes of the mourning song "Of the dying year, to which this closingnight/ Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre/ Vaulted with all they congregatedmight" (23-25).  Again, the reader feels somewhat claustrophobic.  The "closingnight" feels as if it is surrounding the author as he writes and the reader as he or she reads.  The "closing night" is used also to mean the final night.

Shelley shows how he cannot have a transcendence even in an open sky for even the sky is a "dome."  The "sepulchre" is a tomb made out of rock and his imagination and the natural world will be locked and "Vaulted" tight.  But in following lines Shelley writes how this "sepulchre" will "burst" (28).  In that sense, "Vaulted" takes on the meaning of a great leap and even a spring.Shelley uses the phrase "congregated might" not just to mean a collaborative effort, but to represent all types of religion. Shelley seems to use obtuse phrasing to frighten the reader  and to show the long breath of the wind. Shelley wants the reader to visualize the "dome" as having a presence like a volcano. And when the "dome" does "burst," it will act as a "Destroyer and Preserver" and creator.  The use of the words "Black rain and fire and hail..." (28) also helps the reader prepare for the apocalyptic climax which Shelley intended.

        As the rising action continues, Shelley talks of the "Mediterranean" (31) and its "summer dreams" (30).  In the dream, the reader finds the sea

laying "Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay/ And saw in sleep old palaces and towers/ Quivering within the wave's intenser day" (32-34). Shelley implants the idea of a volcano with the word "pumice."  The "old palaces and towers" stir vivid images of ancient Rome and Greece in the readers mind.  Shelley also uses these images in the sea's dream to show that the natural world and the human social and political world are parallel. Again, he uses soft sounding words, but this time it is used to lull the reader into the same dream-like state of the Mediterranean. The "pumice" shows destruction and creation for when the volcano erupts it destroys.  But it also creates more new land.  The "pumice" is

probably Shelley's best example of rebirth and rejuvenation.  The word "Quivering" is not just used to describe the reflection of images in the water.

It is also used to show a sense of fear which seems to be the most common mood and emotion in this poem.  Is Shelley perhaps making a comment that at the root of people's faith is fear of vengeful god?  Maybe, but the main focus of this poem is not just religion, but what religion stands for which is death and rebirth.  Could line 34, also be a comment on Shelley himself?

        In the final stanzas, Shelley has the wind transforming from the natural world toward human suffering.  Shelley pleads with the wind:  "Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!" (54).  He seeks transcendence from the wind and says:"I fall upon the thorns of life!  I bleed" (55). Shelley shows Christ not as a religion, but as a hero of sacrifice and suffering, like the poet himself. 

He again pleads for the wind:  "Drive my dead thought over the universe...to quicken a new birth!" (63-64).  He asks the wind to "Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth/  Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!/ Be through my lips to unawakened Earth" (66-68).  The words "unextinguished hearth" represent the poets undying passion.  The

"hearth" is also at the centre of the earth which helps make the connection between humanity and nature.  Both are constantly trying to reinvent themselves.  When one scatters "ashes" it's at one's death and that person becomes one with the earth.  When one scatters "sparks" it is these sparks that create new fires of creation and destruction.These new "sparks" arise when the "dome" explodes and abandons old ways. Can one ever escape the roots of creation?  Shelley has many Blakean overtones of creation and destruction in the final tercet of this poem.  Shelley's says that his lips are the "trumpet of prophecy" (69).  And many say that Wordsworth is egotistical? Again, he uses biblical sounding words to add drama and importance to his prophetic vision. And it definitely helps achieve Shelley's intended climax when he asks with hope: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far hind? (70).This sentence could be rewritten substituting the word death, for the word "Winter," and the word rebirth, could take the place of "spring."

        Shelley, like all of the Romantic poets, constantly tries to achieve a transcendence to sublime.  In "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley uses the wind as a power of change that flow through history, civilization, religions and human life itself.  Does the wind help Shelley achieve his transcendence?  It seems it has in some sense, but Shelley never achieves his full sublime.  In poems such as "Stanzas written in Dejection Near Naples" Shelley uses images of"lightning" (15) and "flashing" (16) which help demonstrate that he can onlyattain a partial sublime unlike a poet like William Wordsworth.  Perhaps that's why he tries to give rebirth to his individual imagination. One can never restart totally new. Even the trees that will grow from "the winged seeds" arenot totally new, but that is the point Shelley is trying to make. He feels himself to be part of a continuing cycle. Since Shelley is an atheist the only way his soul can live on is through the "incantation" of his words.  So, if his transcendence is to live on in eternity and create inspiration and change in others like the West Wind, then he has achieved something greater than he could have imagined.  But whether he grasped a complete transcendence for himself while he was alive remains to be answered.  It seems that it is only in his death that the "Wild Spirit" (13) could be lifted "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud" to blow free in the "Wild West Wind" (1).