An evaluation of Wyatt Hughes’ Wind and Shelley’s Ode to the West Blowing wind
The notion common to the two Hughes’ and Shelley’s poetry is that of wind as a incredible, uncontrollable force, and the have to reconnect individuals with the natural world. There is also a host of imagery in Hughes’ poem associating wind with strength and violence, such as ‘wind wielded blade-light’ gives rise to images of war and Anglo-Saxon weaponry. This is similar to Shelley’s information of the blowing wind as a ‘chariot’, a link to imagery of powerful rulers or gods. Both poems are strongly linked to man senses and employ the wind as a regenerative tool, in Shelley’s composition the west wind is usually personified through driving the dead leaves ‘like spirits from a great enchanter fleeting’.
‘Ode to the Western world Wind’ can be described as lyric composition that combines the connotations of lyric and épigramme, a presentation of extreme emotive attributes and the utilization of elevated dialect to address a subject. In the first section of the ode, the poet describes the family member ‘powers’ from the west breeze, addressing the wind’s power over the heavens, land and sea in the first 3 stanzas, and establishing the wind as both equally “Destroyer and Preserver”. Whilst the wind maintains the frequency of the seasonal cycle, convoluted logic is presented through creating a parallel between life and fatality, shown incidentally in which the wind scatters useless leaves throughout the floor with the forest, leaving them to ultimately take underlying and bring new existence. In a related style, the opening distinctive line of Hughes’ composition is highly physical, exposing time, surroundings and distance towards the reader inside the phrase ‘far out in sea every night’. This use of metaphor implies total isolation, ‘out at sea’ portrays a picture of the house enduring constant battering from the endless wind as a boat might from surf, whilst the portrayal of your time in ‘all night’ means that the power of the wind so strong that it feels prolonged on the long time size. Futility is paired with remoteness, the stabreim of ‘blinding’ and ‘black’ generate strong emphasis on the person words and heighten physical awareness in the reader although remaining in keeping with the poem’s thematic materials. This is demonstrated in the image of the house ‘floundering’ hopelessly.
The idea of existence cycles reaches humanity as a whole, as mentioned in Shelley’s poem by different colours of the leaves, ‘Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red’. The line ‘each like a cadaver within its grave’ facilitates ideas of multiculturalism, because the various colours from the leaves could be read since symbols of the widespread fatalities of humanity across an array of ethnicities. The falling leaves are personified to become the ‘multitudes’ of individuals across the globe that are suffering illness, and emphasize the role all humanity consumes the circuit of life and death. It is also significant to note the fact that rhyme structure here is highly regular and exemplifies the need for continual activity. This is shown by Shelley’s decision to position a severe accent within the letter Elizabeth in ‘wingèd’, resulting in the word being noticable with two syllables, the first stressed and the second unstressed, in order to remain in preserving the pre-established iambic pentameter metric scheme. This implies that regularity in everyday life is the only way individuals could make it through unruly and external pushes, such as the west wind. Furthermore, in the second stanza, another cycle is established as the wind assists the clouds in shedding: ‘loose clouds just like earth’s decaying leaves are shed. ‘ The rainwater contributes to the regenerative circuit of character as the dead foliage just as the trees brought new life in the forest by shedding dead leaves.
Hughes’ second stanza takes on the role of the witness to the magnitude of legacy the fact that wind is going to ultimately keep, shown in ‘the hills had new places. ‘ The potency of the wind is instantly extended with all the introduction of the character inside the third stanza, with the person being forced to ‘scale’ rather than walk because of the power of wind, implying a very personal connection with pain caused by the breeze itself. Similarly, Shelley establishes leaves while symbolic from the words he wrote, requiring that the wind should scatter his ‘words among mankind’. Aside from the apparent dual connection between leaves found both on trees and books, Shelley wrote in the book, A Defence of Poetry, which the mind is definitely ‘a falling coallike an inconstant breeze, awakens to transitory brightness’. This relates directly to the request for wind to scatter words across humanity, with the idea of a ‘fading coal’ responsive the need to re-ignite the embers that are Shelley’s words. In summary, the final measure of the power of both equally Shelley’s and Hughes’ ‘wind’, is the degree to which completely changed the environment that previously thrived about regularity and permanence.
