What was percy shelleys inspiration in ode to the west

The speaker invokes the “wild West Wind” of autumn, whichscatters the dead leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurturedby the spring, and asks that the wind, a “destroyer and preserver,”hear him. The speaker calls the wind the “dirge / Of the dying year,”and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again imploresit to hear him. The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterraneanfrom “his summer dreams,” and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms,making the “sapless foliage” of the ocean tremble, and asks fora third time that it hear him.

The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that thewind could bear, or a cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push,or even if he were, as a boy, “the comrade” of the wind’s “wanderingover heaven,” then he would never have needed to pray to the windand invoke its powers. He pleads with the wind to lift him “as awave, a leaf, a cloud!”—for though he is like the wind at heart,untamable and proud—he is now chained and bowed with the weightof his hours upon the earth.

The speaker asks the wind to “make me thy lyre,” to behis own Spirit, and to drive his thoughts across the universe, “likewithered leaves, to quicken a new birth.” He asks the wind, by theincantation of this verse, to scatter his words among mankind, tobe the “trumpet of a prophecy.” Speaking both in regard to the season andin regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes his words tohave, the speaker asks: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

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

The wispy, fluid terza rima of “Ode tothe West Wind” finds Shelley taking a long thematic leap beyondthe scope of “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and incorporating hisown art into his meditation on beauty and the natural world. Shelleyinvokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role asboth “destroyer and preserver,” and asks the wind to sweep him outof his torpor “as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!” In the fifth section, thepoet then takes a remarkable turn, transforming the wind into ametaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that drives “deadthoughts” like “withered leaves” over the universe, to “quickena new birth”—that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Herethe spring season is a metaphor for a “spring” of human consciousness,imagination, liberty, or morality—all the things Shelley hoped hisart could help to bring about in the human mind. Shelley asks thewind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he makes it hismetaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him likea musical instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of thetrees. The thematic implication is significant: whereas the oldergeneration of Romantic poets viewed nature as a source of truthand authentic experience, the younger generation largely viewednature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem,Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful naturalmetaphors with which to express his ideas about the power, import,quality, and ultimate effect of aesthetic expression.