Student Question
How do Wordsworth's "Point Rash-Judgment" and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" compare and contrast?
Quick answer:
Wordsworth's "Point Rash-Judgment" and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" both explore nature but differ in tone and theme. Wordsworth's poem is calm, portraying a peaceful walk that shifts to a moral lesson about avoiding rash judgments. It uses everyday language and free verse. In contrast, Shelley's poem is intense, using structured rhyme and iambic pentameter to depict the West Wind as a powerful symbol of creative force and transformation.
“Point Rash-Judgment” by William Wordsworth and “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley are both poems that look at the world through the lens of nature, but they do so in very different ways. Let's examine each poem in turn to get you started on this assignment.
We will begin with the Wordsworth piece. Notice the poem's calm tone. The speaker and his friends enjoy walking along the Grasmere, peacefully enjoying the beauty of nature, picking flowers to try to capture that beauty for themselves, and pausing just to enjoy the day. The poem presents the simplicity of the natural world but also captures its wonder.
However, the poem's narrative takes a moral turn when the three friends catch sight of a man fishing. It is harvest time, and they immediately assume that he is idle, that he is simply being lazy when he should be...
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out working. When they move closer to him, though, they see that he has clearly been ill and is too sick to work. He is fishing for his supper, doing what he can to feed himself and his family. The three friends feel quite guilty at their rash judgment, and to remind themselves to be more charitable in their thoughts, they name the place where they are the “Point of Rash-Judgment.”
Wordsworth's poem is composed in free verse, and its language is that of everyday people. Yet it contains some beautiful and intriguing imagery to help us grasp the wonders of nature.
Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind,” in contrast, is written in iambic pentameter with a consistent rhyme scheme (ABA BCB CDC, et cetera). It, too, presents the wonders of nature but in a much different way. The speaker directly addresses the “wild West Wind,” focusing on its power, personifying it, and setting it up as a symbol for creative expression. The speaker wishes that he were a leaf or a cloud or a wave carried along by the power of the West Wind that he might escape his life and its pain. He also longs for the wind to blow through him so that his ideas and words could flow throughout the universe prophesying to the glories of nature and awakening the dead, dull hearts of humankind to a new spring.
We can see that this poem is much more intense than Wordsworth's piece. To Shelley, nature is not a calm day or a setting for a moral lesson. It is a powerful force that drives the world. It is a force that he wants to enter into and draw inspiration and power from.