I
O wild
West Wind, thou breath of
Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like
ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a
corpse within its grave, until,
Thine
azure sister of the
Spring shall blow
Her
clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odors plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving everwhere;
Destroyer and
Preserver; hear, O hear!
II
Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like Earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of
Heaven and
Ocean,
Angels of rain and lightning: they are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
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. Thou
Dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast
sepulcher,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain and fire and hail will burst: O hear!
III
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue
Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams
,
Beside a pumice isle in
Baiae's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path in the
Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The
sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless
foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!
IV
If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy
power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my
boyhood, and could be
The
comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a
vision; I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! life me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud
.
V
Make me thy
lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over
the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the
incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind
!
Be through my lips to unawakened
Earth
The trumpet of a
prophecy! O Wind,
If
Winter comes, can
Spring be far behind?
-
Percy Bysshe Shelley