is the Italian autumn wind which brings rain. At the time the poem was written, Shelley, then living in Italy, was perhaps the most unpopular poet of his day.

ODE TO THE WEST WIND

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 everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, Oh 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: 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 vapors, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: Oh 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 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: Oh 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 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.

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,

mankind!

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among
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 (1792-1822)

The ode may be defined as a lyric poem, longer than the song, which handles a lofty theme in a dignified and impressive manner. There are as to metrical form, three kinds of odes: regular, irregular, and stanzaic. The regular ode is written in imitation of the Greek ode. It consists of divisions known as strophes, antistrophes, and epodes. These terms allude to the positions assumed by the singers of the ode. All the strophes must have exactly the same metrical structure; so also with the epodes and the antistrophes. Since, however, the music of Pindar's odes is lost, Cowley and other English poets came to imagine that the structure of the Greek ode was absolutely irregular. Hence arose the irregular, or Cowleyan, ode. Examples of this type are Dryden's "Alexander's Feast" and Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Gray's "The Progress of Poesy" is an excellent example of the regular ode. In the nineteenth century several great odes, like those of Keats, have been written in stanzaic forms.

As in the case of free verse, the rimed poem which has no regular structure has been much attacked. In each case the line of defence is the same. The Italian critic Croce and the Imagist poets of today tell us that every poetic idea demands its own special form. In his article on Poetry in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Theodore Watts-Dunton pointed out the principle underlying the seeming lawlessness of such irregular poems as Milton's "Lycidas," Poe's "The Bells," and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan":

"In modern prosody the arrangement of the rhymes

and the length of the lines in any rhymed metrical passage may be determined either by a fixed stanzaic law, or by a law infinitely deeper-by the law which impels the soul, in a state of poetic exaltation, to seize hold of every kind of metrical aid, such as rhyme, cæsura, etc., for the purpose of accentuating and marking off each shade of emotion as it arises, regardless of any demands of stanza. . . If a metrical passage does not gain immensely by being written independently of stanzaic law, it loses immensely. . . . In the regular metres we enjoy the pleasure of feeling that the rhymes will inevitably fall under a recognized law of couplet or stanza. But if the passage flows independently of these, it must still flow inevitably-it must, in short, show that it is governed by another and a yet deeper force, the inevitableness of emotional expression."

Watts-Dunton considered "Kubla Khan" the most perfect of irregular poems in English, but he thought Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" the greatest of all English odes in spite of the fact that certain passages do not possess complete harmony between idea and metrical form.

Changes in science soon render scientific writings obsolete Sir Isaac Newton gives place to Einstein;—but the obsolete philosophy and psychology on which Wordsworth builded do not materially affect the value of his great ode to us. Although a philosopher of today would give different reasons for a belief in personal immortality, Wordsworth's ode has a permanent value which changes in philosophy and psychology are powerless to affect. In