-:Shelley's use of ethereal imagery in Ode to the West Wind:-
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
[4th Stanza]
Imagery, a rather vague critical term uses figurative language in a literary work that represents objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, states of mind and any sensory or extra-sensory experience. Imagery comprises the set of images that may appeal to sense other than sight. In Ode to the West Wind, Shelley's dazzling images come one after another in rapid succession. The successful development of an image to any considerable length is beyond the capacity of all but the best writers. It requires a sustained pressure of imaginative truth and of intellectual control (these two working as one) if the image is to animate and light up and enrich the theme. When we say images, we mean every kind of picture, whether it may be visual or olfactory or tactile, or auditory or gustatory or abstract or it may be kinaesthetic.
In the Ode to the West Wind, as in "To a Skylark", metaphor succeeds to metaphor, simile to simile with such rapidity that it becomes hardly possible to keep pace with the swift kaleidoscopic changes: Shelley uses the images to explain these activities. The "Wild West Wind" is compared to the "breath of Autumn's being" to show that it is the most vital and necessary aspect of Autumn's activity in the physical world. In the next two lines, the invisible West Wind as a spiritual messenger sweeps away "pestilence-stricken" dead leaves which resembles very closely a mighty black magician's scaring away ghosts. The image of multicoloured leaves is infused with a vibrancy uncharacteristic of our notion of pale ghosts. "Moving everywhere" the West Wind drives ripe seeds "to their dark wintry bed" to preserve until the Spring comes. Then Spring wind blows its clarion to awake the seeds for germination and "to feed in air". Thus, we get a vivid picture of Wind's pivotal role as a "destroyer and preserver" on the land.
In the second stanza, Shelley brings images of the sky. The loose clouds driven by the wind are compared to the decayed leaves shaken down to the stream. The dense piles of clouds that hide the horizon and mingle the sky and the sea are pictured as the intertwined branches of two trees of Heaven and Ocean. Clouds also perform the function of the messenger of lightning and rain. Maenad, the frenzy worshipper of Dionysus (Bacchus), is compared with the violent movement of long, wavy clouds that herald a coming storm. This image is important for another reason, i.e. the poet's expectation of an afterlife blessed with Dionysian exultation. Then comes an auditorial image in "dirge". West Wind acts as a reminder of passing year to an end. Again the black night sky covered with clouds and vapours which are compared to the tomb and comes to receive the year's dead body.
The blue Mediterranean lies lulled by the coil of its crystalline streams and sees in sleep old palaces and towers; the Atlantic cleave itself grow gray with fear, tremble and despoil themselves; the forest is the lyre on which the West Wind plays mighty harmonies; the poet's soul is like the forest and his verse, his words, like sparks will bring about conflagration to burn away all, i.e. false and corrupt in the world and will act as the trumpet of a prophecy of a better world waiting to be born.
The breathtaking pace in which the images appear one after another to catch us unaware, adds to the magical beauty of the poem. Surely, Courthope had some of these brilliant pictures in mind when he observed: "If greatness in poetry consisted of a succession of dazzling images and a rapid flow of splendid verse, Shelley would be entitled the very first place in English literature."
In the Ode to the West Wind, as in "To a Skylark", metaphor succeeds to metaphor, simile to simile with such rapidity that it becomes hardly possible to keep pace with the swift kaleidoscopic changes: Shelley uses the images to explain these activities. The "Wild West Wind" is compared to the "breath of Autumn's being" to show that it is the most vital and necessary aspect of Autumn's activity in the physical world. In the next two lines, the invisible West Wind as a spiritual messenger sweeps away "pestilence-stricken" dead leaves which resembles very closely a mighty black magician's scaring away ghosts. The image of multicoloured leaves is infused with a vibrancy uncharacteristic of our notion of pale ghosts. "Moving everywhere" the West Wind drives ripe seeds "to their dark wintry bed" to preserve until the Spring comes. Then Spring wind blows its clarion to awake the seeds for germination and "to feed in air". Thus, we get a vivid picture of Wind's pivotal role as a "destroyer and preserver" on the land.
In the second stanza, Shelley brings images of the sky. The loose clouds driven by the wind are compared to the decayed leaves shaken down to the stream. The dense piles of clouds that hide the horizon and mingle the sky and the sea are pictured as the intertwined branches of two trees of Heaven and Ocean. Clouds also perform the function of the messenger of lightning and rain. Maenad, the frenzy worshipper of Dionysus (Bacchus), is compared with the violent movement of long, wavy clouds that herald a coming storm. This image is important for another reason, i.e. the poet's expectation of an afterlife blessed with Dionysian exultation. Then comes an auditorial image in "dirge". West Wind acts as a reminder of passing year to an end. Again the black night sky covered with clouds and vapours which are compared to the tomb and comes to receive the year's dead body.
The blue Mediterranean lies lulled by the coil of its crystalline streams and sees in sleep old palaces and towers; the Atlantic cleave itself grow gray with fear, tremble and despoil themselves; the forest is the lyre on which the West Wind plays mighty harmonies; the poet's soul is like the forest and his verse, his words, like sparks will bring about conflagration to burn away all, i.e. false and corrupt in the world and will act as the trumpet of a prophecy of a better world waiting to be born.
The breathtaking pace in which the images appear one after another to catch us unaware, adds to the magical beauty of the poem. Surely, Courthope had some of these brilliant pictures in mind when he observed: "If greatness in poetry consisted of a succession of dazzling images and a rapid flow of splendid verse, Shelley would be entitled the very first place in English literature."
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