Percy Bysshe Shelley的作品分析

Percy Bysshe Shelley( 4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major

English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in

the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and

Lord Byron. The novelist Mary Shelley was his second wife.

He is most famous for such classic anthology verse works as Ozymandias, Ode

to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The

Masque of Anarchy, which are among the most popular and critically acclaimed

poems in the English language. His major works, however, are long visionary

poems which included Queen Mab (later reworked as The Daemon of the World),

Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adona?s and the unfinished work The Triumph of Life.

The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820) were dramatic plays in five and

four acts respectively. Although he has typically been figured as a "reluctant

dramatist", he was passionate about the theatre, and his plays continue to be

performed today. He wrote the Gothic novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811)

and the short prose works "The Assassins" (1814), "The Coliseum" (1817) and "Una

Favola" (1819). In 2008, he was credited as the co-author of the novel Frankenstein

(1818) in a new edition by the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Random House in

the U.S. entitled The Original Frankenstein, edited by Charles E. Robinson.[3][4][5]

Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism[6][7], combined

with his strong disapproving voice, made him an authoritative and

much-denigrated figure during his life and afterward. Mark Twain took particular

aim at Shelley in In Defense of Harriet Shelley, where he lambasted Shelley for

abandoning his pregnant wife and child to run off with the 16-year-old Mary

Godwin.[8] Shelley never lived to see the extent of his success and influence;

although some of his works were published, they were often suppressed upon

publication.

He became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets, including

important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets. He was admired by Karl Marx, Oscar

Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, William Butler Yeats,

Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan.[9] Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience

and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's passive resistance were apparently

influenced and inspired by Shelley's non-violence in protest and political action,

although Gandhi does not include him in his list of mentors

"Ode to the West Wind" is one of Shelley's best known lyrics. The poet

describes vividly the activities of the west wind on the earth, in the sky and on the

sea, and then expresses his envy for the boundless freedom of the west wind, and

his wish to be free like the wind and to scatter his words among mankind

Summary

The speaker invokes the "wild West Wind" of autumn, which scatters the dead

leaves and spreads seeds so that they may be nurtured by the spring, and asks that

the wind, a "destroyer and preserver," hear him. The speaker calls the wind the

"dirge / Of the dying year," and describes how it stirs up violent storms, and again

implores it to hear him. The speaker says that the wind stirs the Mediterranean

from "his summer dreams," and cleaves the Atlantic into choppy chasms, making

the "sapless foliage" of the ocean tremble, and asks for a third time that it hear

him.

The speaker says that if he were a dead leaf that the wind could bear, or a

cloud it could carry, or a wave it could push, or even if he were, as a boy, "the

comrade" of the wind's "wandering over heaven," then he would never have

needed to pray to the wind and invoke its powers. He pleads with the wind to lift

him "as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!"--for though he is like the wind at heart, untamable

and proud--he is now chained and bowed with the weight of his hours upon the

earth.

The speaker asks the wind to "make me thy lyre," to be his own Spirit, and to

drive his thoughts across the universe, "like withered leaves, to quicken a new

birth." He asks the wind, by the incantation of this verse, to scatter his words

among mankind, to be the "trumpet of a prophecy." Speaking both in regard to

the season and in regard to the effect upon mankind that he hopes his words to

have, the speaker asks: "If winter comes, can spring be far behind?"

Form

Each of the seven parts of "Ode to the West Wind" contains five stanzas--four

three-line stanzas and a two-line couplet, all metered in iambic pentameter. The

rhyme scheme in each part follows a pattern known as terza rima, the three-line

rhyme scheme employed by Dante in his Divine Comedy. In the three-line terza

rima stanza, the first and third lines rhyme, and the middle line does not; then the

end sound of that middle line is employed as the rhyme for the first and third lines

in the next stanza. The final couplet rhymes with the middle line of the last

three-line stanza. Thus each of the seven parts of "Ode to the West Wind" follows

this scheme: ABA BCB CDC DED EE.

Commentary

The wispy, fluid terza rima of "Ode to the West Wind" finds Shelley taking a

long thematic leap beyond the scope of "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and

incorporating his own art into his meditation on beauty and the natural world.

Shelley invokes the wind magically, describing its power and its role as both

"destroyer and preserver," and asks the wind to sweep him out of his torpor "as a

wave, a leaf, a cloud!" In the fifth section, the poet then takes a remarkable turn,

transforming the wind into a metaphor for his own art, the expressive capacity that

drives "dead thoughts" like "withered leaves" over the universe, to "quicken a new

birth"--that is, to quicken the coming of the spring. Here the spring season is a

metaphor for a "spring" of human consciousness, imagination, liberty, or

morality--all the things Shelley hoped his art could help to bring about in the

human mind. Shelley asks the wind to be his spirit, and in the same movement he

makes it his metaphorical spirit, his poetic faculty, which will play him like a musical

instrument, the way the wind strums the leaves of the trees. The thematic

implication is significant: whereas the older generation of Romantic poets viewed

nature as a source of truth and authentic experience, the younger generation

largely viewed nature as a source of beauty and aesthetic experience. In this poem,

Shelley explicitly links nature with art by finding powerful natural metaphors with

which to express his ideas about the power, import, quality, and ultimate effect of

aesthetic expression.