Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his "Ode to the West…
Introduction to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his "Ode to the West Wind"
Percy Bysshe Shelley
An English poet, humanist and a Platonist who rejected all conventions which he thought stifled human freedom.
Shelley's life and works exemplify English Romanticism in both its extremes of joyous ecstasy and brooding despair.
Romanticism's major themes 一 restlessness and brooding, rebellion aganst authority, interchange with nature, the power of the visionary imagination and of poetry, the pursuit of ideal love, and the untamed spirit ever in search of freedom.
his life experience
At 19, Shelley eloped to Scotland with 16-year-old Harriet westbrook.
Once married, Shelley moved to Lake District of England to study and write.
Two years later he published his first long serious word, Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem.
The poem emerged from Shelley's friendship with the British philosopher William Godwin, and it expressed Godwin's freethinking Socialist philosophy.
Shelley also became enamored of Godwin and Mary Wolstonecraft’s daughter, Mary, and in 1814 they eloped to Europe. In December 1816 Harriet Sheley apparently committed suicide. Three weeks after her body was recovered from a lake in a London park, Sheley and Mary Godwin officialy were married.
Shelley lost custody of his two children by Harriet because of his adherence to the notion of free love.
In 1818, he and his wife left England for the last time.
On July 8, 1822, shortly before his thirtieth birthday, Shelley was drowned in a storm while attempting to sail from Leghoen to La Spezia, Italy, in his schooner, the Don Juan.
Ode to the West Wind
Background
It was written in 1819, worker's movements and revolutionary movments were surging across Europe.
Symbolism
The West wind represents the revolutionary storm sweeping across Europe.
Content
The first stanze describe the power of west wind and its effects.
The second stanze describe the power of the west wind by clouds, rain,hail and lighting.
The third stanze talks the west wind blows the waves.
The fourth stanze describe the poet's emotion caused by the west wind.
The last stanze the poet asks the west wind to help him sweep away his twiligh, to spread his words around and wake the sleeping earth.