英国文学史《西风颂》Ode_to_the_West_Wind赏析
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—— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Ode to the West Wind: Notes
• Written in the Autumn, 1819, and published in the following year, this poem has become one of the most popular and best-known of Shelley's verses. In a note Shelley outlined the circumstances behind the poem's making:
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
The West Wind is a manifestation of spiritual or supernatural energy, associated with breath, respiration and inspiration, with pneuma and anima, the Holy Ghost or Spirit, the spirit of life itself. This is important in a stanza whiห้องสมุดไป่ตู้h contains so many references and allusions to death and decay, reaffirming the energy and vitality of the west wind.
• 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 the skyey speed Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
• 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: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy 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 sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!
• 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 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 grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley
• A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and … Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
• 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 odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
Ode to the West Wind: Notes
• This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when the tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.
Apart from the alliteration it is also worth noting the capitalisation of West Wind in the poem. In typically Romantic fashion an abstract quality or aspect of Nature is personified and addressed in the poem, such that it appears divine or god-like, or as an expression of the divine
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Leaves here refer to trees and the wind-borne seeds, but the phrase also carries associations with paper (leaves from books?), the "withered leaves" (and "dead thoughts") referred to in stanza 5, which are driven across the universe by the power of the wind. The leaves here are dead and fall to the Earth, a recurrent theme in this stanza, but there they may give rise to new life.
• 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?
Ode to the West Wind: Notes
• Written in the Autumn, 1819, and published in the following year, this poem has become one of the most popular and best-known of Shelley's verses. In a note Shelley outlined the circumstances behind the poem's making:
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
The West Wind is a manifestation of spiritual or supernatural energy, associated with breath, respiration and inspiration, with pneuma and anima, the Holy Ghost or Spirit, the spirit of life itself. This is important in a stanza whiห้องสมุดไป่ตู้h contains so many references and allusions to death and decay, reaffirming the energy and vitality of the west wind.
• 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 the skyey speed Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
• 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: there are spread On the blue surface of thine airy 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 sepulchre, Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: O hear!
• 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 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 grey with fear, And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) Ode to the West Wind
Percy Bysshe Shelley
• A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others. The pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and … Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.
• 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 odours plain and hill: Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!
Ode to the West Wind: Notes
• This poem was conceived and chiefly written in a wood that skirts the Arno, near Florence, and on a day when the tempestuous wind, whose temperature is at once mild and animating, was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains. They began, as I foresaw, at sunset with a violent tempest of hail and rain, attended by that magnificent thunder and lightning peculiar to the Cisalpine regions.
Apart from the alliteration it is also worth noting the capitalisation of West Wind in the poem. In typically Romantic fashion an abstract quality or aspect of Nature is personified and addressed in the poem, such that it appears divine or god-like, or as an expression of the divine
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Leaves here refer to trees and the wind-borne seeds, but the phrase also carries associations with paper (leaves from books?), the "withered leaves" (and "dead thoughts") referred to in stanza 5, which are driven across the universe by the power of the wind. The leaves here are dead and fall to the Earth, a recurrent theme in this stanza, but there they may give rise to new life.
• 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?