he West Wind is the object of the speaker's plea in this poem, the powerful force that could deliver him from his inability to make himself heard or to communicate his ideas to others. Blowing from the west suggests an association with the revolutionary, liberating aspects of the young United States, or perhaps simply a favorable wind for ships returning home to ports in Europe. Associated with autumn, the West Wind brings with it decay and the certainty of a wintry death, but it also makes a spring rebirth possible by clearing away the old dead leaves and planting seeds.

Line 1: The West Wind is the object of an apostrophe at the beginning of this line. This is the first time, and by no means the last, that the speaker will apostrophize the wind. In fact, you could say that this whole poem is one long apostrophe. You might also notice the excessive alliteration in this line: "O wild West Wind" is a bit over the top.
Lines 5-7: The West Wind is personified here as the charioteer of the "winged seeds" that it carries to their dormant rest in the earth during the winter. Shelley will continue to personify the wind throughout the poem, although it never becomes a fully-developed character.
Line 14: The West Wind is described as "Destroyer and Preserver," which some scholars think is an allusion to the Hindu gods Siva and Vishnu. Line 14 also introduces the refrain of "Ode to the West Wind," "O hear!", which appears at the end of the first three cantos.
Lines 18-23: The West Wind becomes part of a complex simile in these lines: the storm clouds spread across the "blue surface" of the wind are like a MÃ¦nad's locks of hair. We know this is a simile and not a metaphor because the word "Like" appears at the beginning of line 20.

Dead LeavesDead leaves are referenced no less than five times in this short lyric poem. Dead leaves are the remnants of the previous season which the wind clears away; they're also a metaphorical representation of the pages of writing and poetry generated by the speaker, or perhaps even the author. Once ideas are put down on paper, they're printed on the "leaves" of a book. At that point, they seem to be declining.

Lines 2-5: The dead leaves are part of a complicated simile in these lines: dead leaves blown away by the wind are like ghosts running away from an enchanter. When Shelley lists the colors of the leaves as "Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red," we detect an allusion to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It's Death, of course, who rides the pale horse.
Line 16: Here we learn that the clouds are "like Earth's decaying leaves." In the previous simile, the leaves were the main focus and the simile created an image that told us more about them; here, the clouds are the main focus and the leaves are used as an image that tells us more about them.
Lines 64-66: The speaker compares his thoughts in a simile to "withered leaves," which is a pun on the two meanings of "leaves" - things that drop off trees, but also the pages of a book. Since the speaker himself is a poet who describes his plea to the West Wind as "the incantation of this verse" (65), the pun is even more obvious. However, because this is a very formal poem with heightened diction, we'd prefer to call this a "play on words" instead of a pun.

FuneralsAlthough there aren't any literal funerals in "Ode to the West Wind," there's plenty of funereal imagery and symbolism. We've got dirges, corpses, the "dying year," a sepulcher, and ashes, just to name a few. Of course, they don't all come at once - they're spread throughout the poem as parts of different metaphors and trains of images. Taken all together, though, 9they make us feel like this poem is a kind of elegy (or lament) just as much as it's an ode.

Lines 5-12: In an extended simile, Shelley compares seeds to corpses lying in their graves. This is also an allusion to the Christian imagery of the Apocalypse, in which a "Last Trumpet" is blown (here, the Spring blows a "clarion," which is a kind of trumpet) in order to resurrect the bodies of the dead (here, the corpses of the seeds, which will come to life in the spring). For more on this, see "Quotes and Thoughts" under the theme "Mortality."
Lines 23-28: This extended metaphor compares the West Wind to a dirge, the dying year to the dead man in a funeral, and the night sky to the dome of a sepulchre. Toward the end of the metaphor, Shelley's imagery breaks away from the strict correspondences of the metaphor, and both the wind and the inside of the sepulchre become stormy. It's almost as though, when the storm breaks, when "Black rain and fire and hail will burst," the metaphor is broken down from inside.
Lines 65-67: The poem becomes a spell, or "incantation," by which the poet hopes to make the West Wind scatter his words, which are metaphorically described as "[a]shes and sparks." Some of the words have the power to light new metaphorical "fires" under other poets and thinkers, while others are already "dead."

The Ã†olian HarpThe Ã¦olian harp was a common parlor instrument in the nineteenth century. Sort of like a wind chime, the Ã¦olian harp (or "Ã¦olian lyre" or "wind harp") was meant to be left in a windy spot, perhaps a window, so that the wind could play its own natural tunes on the instrument. For Romantic poets like Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, the Ã¦olian harp came to represent the way that the individual poet could turn himself into an instrument that expressed something more universal about the natural world. In "Ode to the West Wind," Shelley's speaker begs the West Wind to treat him as its lyre or trumpet or other instrument.

Lines 57-58: The speaker apostrophizes the West Wind, asking it to make him into a lyre. He actually wants to be turned into a passive instrument or object.
Lines 59-61: Describing the "music" that the West Wind will draw from him as its instrument, the speaker characterizes its "harmonies" as in "tumult," a powerful paradox.

Bodies of WaterAlthough "Ode to the West Wind" is mostly about, well, the wind, the middle of the poem moves away from the airy breezes and considers a different element: water. This slippage starts to happen in Canto II, where the wind is described as having a "stream" (15) and a "blue surface" (19), which makes it sound like a body of water. We're also reminded that the clouds being carried by the wind came originally from the water that evaporated from the ocean and that they'll rain back down into it. In the next canto, we learn how the wind wakes the Mediterranean Sea from his "summer dreams" (29) and chops up the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. The water almost washes away the wind for a moment there - but the poem reminds us that the West Wind is always stronger than the calm, passive seas.

Lines 15-17: These lines combine intense imagery of the natural world with a complex extended metaphor. In the metaphor, "decaying leaves" falling from "tangled boughs" onto the earth are compared to the clouds that come from "Heaven and Ocean." In other words, the combination of Heaven, the sky with the sun in it, and Ocean, causes water to evaporate into the sky and form clouds. These clouds then float on the "stream" of the West Wind the way dead leaves float in a real stream.
Line 28: Here the water that has evaporated from the ocean rains back down. To emphasize the violence and power of the storm, Shelley uses ten one-syllable words in this line, creating a strong, harsh sound as is read aloud.
Lines 29-30: The Mediterranean Sea is personified here as a dreaming man, whom the wind can "waken" from "his summer dreams" (29).
Lines 37-41: In three of these lines, the verb is placed at the end of the line. This creates an enjambment that drives the reader from one line to the next; this is rather like what's actually happening at this point in the poem: the Atlantic is splitting itself into "chasms" for the West Wind.

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