Sunday Pages: "Ode to the West Wind"

A poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Dear Reader,

That the protest was peaceful, and the mood festive, did not mean that the multitudes who gathered in the park that day—men, women, and children—were not angry.

There was much to be angry about. A sweeping tariff, imposed in a dunderheaded attempt to protect domestic production, had the exact opposite effect, sending food prices through the roof. Inflation exacerbated an economic downturn, where labor was plentiful but jobs scarce, especially for young people. The top one percent—the oligarchs—became even more grotesquely wealthy. The government, rightly fearing popular revolt, took a more authoritarian turn.

The nonviolent assembly was nothing less than a rally for liberty: pro-democracy, anti-monarchy. And half the city turned out for it.

That was the impetus for the gathering on the afternoon of August 16, 1819, at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester—what we in 2025 America might regard as an early-19th-century No Kings Day. Some sixty thousand people, in a city of about 120,000, assembled to hear Henry Hunt, a “radical” politician so eloquent he was known as Orator Hunt, speak. There was a buzz in the air. The city’s magistrates, a wealthy cabal of Ebenezer Scrooges and Henry F. Potters and Sir Topham Hatts, were rightly terrified.

This was four years after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. Many of the men affected by the lousy British economy were veterans, who felt the government they’d valiantly fought for had betrayed them. From its birthplace in France, revolutionary fervor was sweeping across the Continent. Britain may have won the battle, but it lost the war. Change was coming, was inevitable. And the elites feared change. (The bloated king—George III, the same monarch the colonial Americans declared independence from in 1776—would have feared change as well, had he not been too stark-raving mad to know what was going on.)

Hunt’s “radical” message was that the corrupt, antiquated, non-representational Parliament needed immediate and sweeping reform. At a time when only the landed aristocracy, some two percent of the growing population, could vote, the Orator called for universal suffrage—and for women as well as men. And he wanted a repeal of the Corn Laws—the series of misguided tariffs on grain imports, the failure of which inspired the economist David Ricardo to debunk tariffs. Most radically of all, Hunt believed that peaceful mass protest was the only way to make this happen.

Joining Hunt on the bill that day were the three founders of the Manchester Patriotic Union Society, who had organized the event; several other leading radicals; and, most remarkably for 1819, three women’s rights activists: Mary Fildes, Sarah Hargreaves, and Elizabeth Gaunt, who was visibly pregnant. Also on the stage—the hustings, as it was called—were a group of journalists, on hand to cover what wound up being a more significant event in British history than any of them had imagined.

Watching the crowd swell, the avaricious magistrates became alarmed. What if this gaggle of peasants became violent? What if that rabble-rouser Orator Hunt enjoined the stupid mob to attack the rich? What if—gasp—their property was destroyed? Never mind that the men were dressed more for church than battle, or that many of them brought their wives and children. The self-interested magistrates only saw danger ahead. So they called the constable and demanded the immediate arrest of Orator Hunt.

This was easier said than done. To get to Hunt, the cops would have to disperse the crowd, which, by contemporary accounts, was so dense that the men’s hats were touching. The constable thus requested backup from the military. And so the cavalry—the Manchester & Salford Yeomanry; the brute squad—was called in.

What followed was brutal. The yeomanry rode into the crowd, clearing a path for the constables. As soon as the solders and police went by, people scurried back to where they were, so the goons couldn’t simply turn around and leave. The horses, unaccustomed to packed crowds, got scared. As the cavalry approached the stage, people joined arms to stop them from getting to Hunt. So the soldiers on horseback—many of whom were drunk—drew their sabres and began to hack away at the crowd. And things only got worse from there.

This is from the eyewitness account of Samuel Bamford:

The cavalry were in confusion; they evidently could not, with the weight of man and horse, penetrate that compact mass of human beings; and their sabres were plied to cut a way through naked held-up hands and defenceless heads...

On the breaking of the crowd the yeomanry wheeled, and, dashing whenever there was an opening, they followed, pressing and wounding. Women and tender youths were indiscriminately sabred or trampled...

A young married woman of our party, with her face all bloody, her hair streaming about her, her bonnet hanging by the string, and her apron weighed with stones, kept her assailant at bay until she fell backwards and was near being taken; but she got away covered with severe bruises. In ten minutes from the commencement of the havoc the field was an open and almost deserted space. The hustings remained, with a few broken and hewed flag-staves erect, and a torn and gashed banner or two dropping; whilst over the whole field were strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes, and other parts of male and female dress, trampled, torn, and bloody.

Several mounds of human flesh still remained where they had fallen, crushed down and smothered. Some of these still groaning, others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath, and others would never breathe again.

Hunt and the others on stage, including all the journalists, were arrested. Mary Fildes was badly injured when one of the yeomen slashed her belly with his sabre. Elizabeth Gaunt was savagely beaten, and later, denied food and water in the jail, suffered a miscarriage. Some five hundred people in the peaceful crowd were wounded, a disproportionate number of them women, whom the inebriate soldiers seemed to target intentionally.

Eighteen people died. The first fatality was a two-year-old boy: William Fildes, Mary’s nephew.

Writing up his account of the day’s atrocities, James Wroe, editor of the radical Manchester Observer, coined a name for the event, “Peterloo,” combining the “Peter” of St. Peter’s Square with the “-loo” of Waterloo, to shame and mock the soldiers who participated in the killings. From then on, it was known as the “Peterloo Massacre.”

The British authorities did their best to censor any mention of the atrocity, lest it inspire other protests. Parliament passed the notorious Six Acts, criminalizing political assembly as well as criticism of the government, which was considered libel.

All of this was in vain. The Peterloo Massacre fueled a great democratic movement that led to the Reform Act of 1832, which, among other things, redistricted the seats in Parliament so that cities like Manchester had better representation.

Peterloo also inspired the great British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was in Italy at the time, and had just turned 27, to write some of his greatest work.

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Shelley was born in 1792—the year George Washington was re-elected; came of age during the Regency Period and the Napoleonic Wars; and died with revolutionary sentiment brewing across the Continent. He came from money but was estranged from his father, and lived most of his life in financial distress. He was kicked out of Eton, along with his buddy Thomas Jefferson Hogg, for publishing a treatise titled “The Necessity of Atheism.” He didn’t believe in marriage or monogamy but got married twice, for legal reasons, fathered several children that we know of, and, for a time, appears to have lived in what is now called a “throuple.” He was an atheist, a Romantic, a political radical, a small-r republican, a vegetarian, a champion of freedom of speech (a real one, not whatever Elon Musk is), a pacifist who would inspire Tolstoy and Gandhi, and, while not famous or financially successful during his lifetime, a friend to all the leading literary lights of his day.

I think of him and his friend Lord Byron as poetical rock stars, but Shelley is more accurately analogous to an influential indie artist who never signed with a major label. He was ahead of his time by, oh, about 200 years. If you reanimated him right now—using the technology, perhaps, dreamed up by his wife Mary Shelley in Frankenstein—and dropped him off at a vegan restaurant in the East Village, he’d fit right in.

Shelley died at 29, just two years after Peterloo. In the interval between the massacre and his tragic death, he wrote three poems directly inspired by the atrocity.

“England in 1819,” the shortest of the trio, does not mince words, beginning:

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

Change “blind” to “fat” and “princes” to “tech-bros,” and the poem may as well be called “America in 2025.”

The second Peterloo poem, “The Masque of Anarchy,” which I wrote about last Sunday, calls out by name the British politicians responsible for the oppressive political climate—Castlereagh, Eldon, Sidmouth—and ends with the rousing call for mass nonviolent protest:

‘Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.’

And then there is his masterpiece, “Ode to the West Wind,” one of my all-time favorite poems. Although less explicitly linked than the other two, “West Wind” is still clearly informed by Peterloo and the spirit of revolution.

Structurally, the poem consists of five verses of 14 lines each: basically a quintet of sonnets. “Ode to the West Wind” is not an ode as much as an incantation, an invocation, a summoning. As Autumn gives way to Winter, Shelley feels powerless, lost, adrift, afraid. He casts a spell to summon the might of the West Wind, to harness it, to have its spirit move through him to give him the strength to prevail over the dark, malevolent forces working against him—and to bring about radical change. It begins:

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Shelley is directly addressing the West Wind, which he associates—wrongly, per European tradition—with Autumn. Greek mythology, with which the poet was intimately familiar, holds that the West Wind is ruled by Zephyrus, and is the most mild and sweet of the directional winds: the bringer of not Autumn but Spring. Thus he sets up, in the poem’s first line, the dramatic ending.

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:

The dead leaves—leaves that are yellow, black, red; so many of them, all dead—are driven away from the West Wind like ghosts running away from some Tolkienian wizard.

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:

The Wind drives (“chariotest”) seeds to and fro and buries them, like a million corpses in a million tiny graves, until the Spring comes, filling the plains and the hills with bright colors and sweet smells.

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

The West Wind is everywhere, it can be felt no matter where you go, and it has the power to both protect and destroy. This is the mighty force that Shelley summons, that he asks to “hear” him.

The first verse, then, sets up the incantation; addresses the Wind; and shows the Wind’s power over small, earthly things: leaves. In the second verse, we move away from the earth and into another element, air:

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:

Shelley is comparing the leaves from the first verse to clouds. The grammar of these lines is a bit confusing:

there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry 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.

Looking out at the blue ocean, the coming thunderclouds, from the horizon up as far as the eye can see, look like the flowing hair (the “locks”) of a Maenad, in a state of frenzied ecstasy. In Roman myth, a Maenad is a Bacchante, or female follower of Bacchus. Thus Shelley is comparing the appearance of the wind on the water to a creature of Greek myth, and also, more subtly, the status of the mythological creature—an all-in disciple of an omnipotent god—to himself.

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: oh hear!

From the visual, Shelley then moves to the aural: from sight to sound. The blast of wind is a dirge, a funeral song, of the “dying year,” and the darkening sky a “vast sepulchre,” or stone tomb. When the storm finally comes, it will produce, in great bursts, black rain, hail, and fire.

And it has tremendous power, the power to make waves in the calm Mediterranean, and “cleave” the Atlantic Ocean:

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lull’d 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!

This is dangerous stuff he’s playing with, so mighty it causes living things of great strength to quake and shit their pants.

The imagery, the word choices, and the syntax of the poem are so captivating that we might not even notice the careful structure, the iambic pentameter, or the intricate rhyme scheme. I’ve read “West Wind” countless times and even I miss it: ABA, BCB, CDC, DED, FF, repeated five times.

In the last two verses, we build to a climax. Here, Shelley introduces himself into the proceedings, using the first person, calling upon the West Wind to do to him, metaphorically, what it literally does to leaves, clouds, and waves:

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!

And he’s not above bargaining. I don’t need all the bells and whistles, he’s saying; just make me as free as I was in childhood:

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 seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Even that tiny injection of Wind power would be sufficient, he thinks, to provide him the pick-me-up he needs.

And now he begs: begs the West Wind to raise him up and propel him—he who, once “tameless, and swift, and proud,” can fly no more, because he is encumbered by “heavy weight of hours”:

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 chain’d and bow’d
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

But he doesn’t call on the West Wind to merely lift him up. No. What he’s really asking for is for the Zephyr’s spirit to possess him. He wants that tameless creative energy to consume him and agitate inside of him, like a nuclear reactor, so that it may radiate out from him, explosive.

In 2025, we have had decades of watching this kind of scene unfold on movie screens depicting the MCU. Is there a superhero who becomes the wind? If so, Shelley is that undiscovered Avenger:

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.

He is willing to sacrifice himself in order to become the Wind’s instrument. I imagine him high on a mountain, eyes closed, arms extended like a chalice above his head—a vessel for the Zephyr, as he performs the incantation:

Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

And why is this so important? Why does he want the fierce Spirit to overcome him? So that his message may be broadcast, as loudly as possible, to audiences far and wide:

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

In normal language, he’s saying, “You know how ashes and sparks scatter from a fireplace that hasn’t gone out? I want you to do that, but with my words, and on the grandest possible scale.”

And then come the words—final three lines, the last of which is probably my favorite single example of iambic pentameter: a metaphor so simple yet so profound, and so nourishing and necessary for us to hear this fall, of all falls:

Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

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This poetical superhero, with this wisdom, and this will, and this willingness to put himself in mortal peril for the greater good—this force of creativity and kindness and hope—wants us to know that change is coming. There will be renewal. There will be renaissance, which is just a medieval French word for rebirth. There may even be revolution.

Shelley is speaking these things into existence.

And who is the intended audience for his message? “Unawaken’d earth.” That can mean the literal land: a northern hemisphere frozen in hibernation. But I read it as a call to the people: the somnambulant ones who sleepwalk through the oppression, who have acquiesced to the loss of freedom. If the poet is the messenger, the one sent to rouse the slumbering multitude, that means Percy Bysshe Shelley is, in a word, woke.

His hopeful message resonates still. The United States in 2025 is more progressive than Orator Hunt might have ever dreamed of, but the despotic vestiges of 1819 Britain remain. There are obvious similarities: ICE is the modern-day American iteration of the Manchester Yeomanry. On “No Kings” Day, the old, mad, fat, despised, and (if the droopy chin and bruised hand is any indication) dying Donald Trump was itching for “antifa” to turn violent. He ached for a bloody Peterloo of his own, so he could have an excuse to enact a Project 2025 version of the Six Acts—an invocation of the Insurrection Act—and quell all protest.

That did not happen, but that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods. Donald’s bloodlust has not been sated. Tyrants come and tyrants go, but tyranny is always a threat that must be actively combated.

On July 8, 1822, a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley died in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. His distended body washed up on shore two weeks later, recognizable only by his clothes and the sodden manuscript in his pocket. A funeral was held on the strand, and his body cremated.

But something incredible happened: his heart did not burn.

You don’t have to be an English major to understand the symbolism there, just as you don’t have to be a poet to appreciate the symbolism of a wannabe king taking a wrecking ball to the People’s House.

The indestructible spirit never dies. The heart beats on. Love prevails.

Winter might be coming, but spring will always follow.

Hope springs eternal.

And there’s a reason Donald Trump is so afraid of windmills. On some primal level, he knows what Shelley knew: that if the Wind—the wild West Wind, destroyer and preserver—is mighty enough to cleave the Atlantic, then it also has the power to set us free.

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Photo credit: Portrait of Shelley (we now think) made in 1822 by William Edward West. There is a fascinating story around this painting.

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ICYMI

On Wednesday, I filled in for Lisa Graves, co-hosting The Five 8 1/2 with Nadine Smith:

On Friday, our guest on The Five 8 was the AI pioneer Nate Soares, author of the new book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.