Ode to the West Wind
The wind that drives dead leaves like ghosts fleeing an enchanter, and drops winged seeds into their dark wintry bed, is addressed as destroyer and preserver at once, then followed into the sky it fills with loose clouds and down into the Mediterranean it cleaves as far as the sapless foliage of the sea. Halfway through, the address turns into a request: to be lifted as a wave, a leaf, a cloud, by a spirit the speaker once matched for speed and no longer can. Composed in a wood beside the Arno outside Florence in the autumn of 1819, in a chain of terza rima sonnets built for the occasion.
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