is capable of carrying clouds, rain, lightning, and hail, other awe-inspiring forces of nature. Shelley utilizes asimile that likens the wind to the hair of a Maenad.

The third canto describes the wind's power to turn placid seas into fearsome forces that even strike fear into the sea's underworld flora as Shelley employs a pathetic fallacy.

In the fourth canto, the speaker confesses his desire to be one with the wind, imploring it to "lift [me] as a wave, a leaf, a cloud" and deliver the speaker from a life that "has chain'd and bow'd" him.  The speaker identifies with the wind's "tameless, and swift, and proud" nature.

Shelley glorifies the West Wind as a "wild spirit" and he praises the Wind for being tameless, proud, and swift. He remembers the Wind as a pleasant force during his summer days on the shores of the Mediterranean, but also celebrates its fierce autumnal power. Most importantly, he glories in the Wind as a forceful agent of change. 

Much of the imagery of the poem revolves around the Wind's ability to scatter objects of nature. The poet wants to share the Wind's fierce spirit. As a radical, Shelley gloried in the wind's ability to blow away dead ideas, represented by the leaves that have died and fallen. But the Wind doesn't just blow away dead ideas; it also circulates fresh ideas by also blowing them all over.

Thus, Shelley celebrates the wind as prophetic: as the Wind sweeps away what is "decaying," it also sweeps in change. 

Shelly glories in the similarities between the Wind's power to blow natural elements across the earth and the poet's prophetic capabilities. If the Wind controls the leaves, the poet also writes on his own "leaves" of paper. Shelley longs for the wind's power to circulate his ideas. As he writes:

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

In Section 2 of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," the poet continues his description of the powerful West Wind by describing its effect on the clouds. The wind bears along the clouds as a stream bears along leaves that fall into it. Although line 15 implies the action of the wind by comparing it to a stream that carries fallen leaves, the more explicit description of the wind's action on the clouds occurs in line 44: "If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee." From these two lines, it is clear that the wind has power to move the clouds in the direction it is moving; it causes the clouds to fly along with it.

Section 2 compares clouds to leaves and angels. First, Shelley states that "loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed," comparing clouds to leaves that fall to the earth in autumn. Taking the analogy further, he says that the branches from which the clouds fall are the "tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean."

In the second stanza of Section 2, Shelley writes that the clouds are "angels of rain and snow." Although he uses the term "angels" in its sense of "messengers," using that word also makes an implied comparison between clouds and angelic beings.

After comparing the wind to a stream and the clouds as objects that flow or fly along with it, Shelley states his wish that his words could travel over the universe in the same unimpeded way.

In Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," the wind comes from autumn itself. Shelley calls it the "breath of Autumn's being." In the poem, Shelley moves from emotions of mourning to emotions of hope, all brought on by watching the west wind blow.

In the first two stanzas, Shelley feels the sadness that comes with autumn and the knowledge that winter is not far away. Shelley uses multiple images of death to express his bleak emotions about autumn's leaves, which are blown from the trees by the west wind: they are

"dead  ... Pestilence-stricken multitudes ... they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave ... 

In contrast, in the third stanza, Shelley's emotions are nostalgic as he remembers the warmth of summer, when the shores of the Mediterranean were "overgrown with azure moss and flowers/So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!"

By stanzas four and five, Shelley moves back to the present and longs for his words to be blown around by the west wind like autumn's leaves. If in the first two stanzas the poet's emotion is that of mourning the death the leaves represent, by the last two stanzas his mood has changed from grief to desire. Now he wishes for a force like the west wind to spread his words--his poems and essays-- far and wide. As he writes,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

If we remember that Shelley was a radical, we can see that in the first stanzas, he identifies and sympathizes with the "leaves" as representatives of the working class whose struggle for rights was being broken and shattered by the English upper class as he was writing. But by the end, the leaves have turned into his words, which, if they are circulated, gain power and carry the potential for change.

In Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," the wind is an agent of change, a "wild spirit," both "destroyer and preserver." When Shelley writes that the leaves from the wind "Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, / Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, / Pestilence-stricken multitudes," he means, of course, that the wind blows the dead leaves before it, but his language invests this simple action with a kind of dread significance: The wind is an "enchanter" from which the leaves flee like "ghosts." Similarly, the wind causes the clouds to fly "like earth's decaying leaves" across the sky. When he writes that the clouds are "Like the bright hair uplifted from the head / Of some fierce Maenad, / even from the dim verge / Of the horizon to the zenith’s height / The locks of the approaching storm," he means that the wind has has made the clouds of the approaching storm into the hair of a "Maenad," or a frenzied female worshipper of Bacchus, the god of wine. We can see that from the way Shelley describes the effect of the wind on the clouds and leaves that the wind is a spirit of wild, anarchic freedom, one which the poet longs to follow.

The autumn leaves, falling from the trees, are blown all over by the wind. The poem compares the wind to a chariot, carrying the leaves everywhere. Meanwhile, the wind blows around the clouds that are gathering overhead to unleash a storm.

The speaker wishes he too could be like a dead leaf or a "swift" cloud, blown around the earth and up toward heaven by the wind, not chained to the ground below.

The speaker says his leaves—meaning the leaves of paper that he has written his words and verses on—are like the leaves falling from the trees. He wishes the wind could scatter his leaves (his written thoughts and ideas) around the earth, just as it scatters the autumn leaves. He also wants his own spirit to be fierce, strong, and impetuous like the wind.

Shelley was a political radical for his time period (although we wouldn't find his ideas radical today), and the storm he describes gathering as the wind blows the clouds is a metaphor for the political stormclouds he believes are gathering in his day, ready to burst on the earth like "black" rain and hail, bringing change. He wishes his own writing could be among the sparks that generate political transformation.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was the most politically revolutionary of the Romantic poets and in "Ode to the West Wind," he looks forward to the death of the old order and the coming of a new era. He begins by describing the way in which the Wind, personified and apostrophized, drives away the dead leaves while bearing the "winged seeds" in a chariot "to their dark wintry bed." With the same force, the West Wind drives out the old ideas and customs, which are ghostly and stricken with pestilence, and prepares the way for vigorous new life. Spring will complete this work, blowing her clarion over the "dreaming earth," and turning the dream of revolution to reality.

The poem emphasizes the destructive nature of the West Wind, but continually points out that destruction of what is already dead is necessary for renewal and rebirth. Shelley asks the Wind to fill his spirit with its impetuous reforming zeal, concluding with the lines:

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

In “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley uses symbolism to help the reader visualize the changes coming. The poem begins by talking about the West Wind bringing Autumn and the time when life goes dormant and gets buried.

The poem uses the changing of seasons and the decay of Winter to symbolize changes coming to the world. The current state of affairs is symbolized as Winter. Shelly signifies this time by using several references to death: “Each like a corpse within its grave,” “black rain, and fire, and hail will burst,” and “drive my dead thoughts over the universe.” Although the poem talks about a dark period, it also brings hope and change to the reader.

The next era is symbolized through lines such as “like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth” and “be through my lips to unawaken’d earth.” Shelley ends the poem with a glimmer of hope in the coming change in the line “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Spring is a time of rebirth and growth.