SHELLEY'S NEW YEAR'S EXORCISM

If there’s one great poem for this very day, December 28, 2020, with so many feeling hope for better times simply because the most dreadful year in our collective memory will end at midnight in a mere four days, it must be Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” which you can—and should!—read below.

Just come to the fifth line and you can see writ large a prophecy of where the world is today—the home, indeed, of “pestilence-stricken multitudes.” Although this vision of future times is set in autumn, the “dirge//Of the dying year” sung by the wild west wind might be more appropriate music for us this New Year’s Eve than Robert Burns’s “Auld Lang Syne” — although so many lives have been lost this year to Covid that a sad tune toasting old friends gone must surely retain a place.

But Shelley’s exorcism of the rancid heart of the fading year can hit a deeper note of catharsis for us right now. We don’t want to merely say goodbye to 2020,, we want to rain fire and fury down upon it and smother it inside a tomb until it’s extinguished:

…this closing night

Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!

The resonance of the Ode, which Shelley wrote in 1819, largely in a wood that skirts the Arno River, near Florence, with our currently diseased days struck me during an immensely enjoyable Zoom lecture last week by my friend Gregory Dowling, a professor in Venice, a superb critic of American and English poetry, and a writer of thrillers set in the city of canals.

During his lecture, “Shelley in Italy: the Background to ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ Professor Dowling mentioned in passing that the word “hectic,” in the line describing the ghostly autumn leaves as “Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red” originally meant “feverish.” Over 200 years later, we find, if we didn’t know it before, that Shelley is our spiritual contemporary.

Another strong connection with 2020 is that, as the professor noted, the ode is a political poem, in which “the wind is the wind of revolution” and the poet is sounding a trumpet blast to awaken the nonviolent “regeneration of mankind.” Thinking back to this summer’s massive marches in protest of the killings of black people by the police, it’s easy to find Shelley’s spirit compelling again—indeed, it seems to me of a piece with Bob Dylan’s lines in “Tangled Up in Blue”: “There was music in the cafés at night/And revolution in the air.”

Other lines from the Dylan song vibrate on a Shellyan frequency:

Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true

And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you

While the 13th Century Italian poet who triggered such passion in Dylan might well have been the great Florentine lyricist Guido Cavalcanti (1255-1300), I prefer to think it was Dante (1265-1321)—especially since Shelley was immersed in reading The Divine Comedy at the time he wrote the Ode. Reading Dante entailed the act of translation for Shelley, which served to "break the spell” of the young Romantic poet when he was finding it hard to write his own poems, according to Dowling.

Those naive enough to claim that the likes of Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth relied mainly on otherworldly inspiration to compose their verses need only notice the way Shelley combines twelve lines of Dantean terza rima with a Shakespearean couplet in each portion of the Ode—the professor observed that the parts amount to “five sonnets”—to grasp that the great Romantics were masters of form.

I strongly suggest that you take in Gregory Dowling’s next lecture on January 11, in which he will discuss two Keats poems, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and “Ode to Autumn,” one of the most magnificent poems I know. Gregory’s lectures are like a virtual cruise in Italy accompanied by a great poet and a fabulous critic.

Ode To The West Wind

By Percy Bysshe Shelley


1.
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 winged 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!

2.
Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
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 aery surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, 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,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!

3.
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
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

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: oh, hear!

4.
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.

5.
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?