Ode to Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley Stanza 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,	60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,	65
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?	70

It’s a wonderful, mysterious thing when something we see in nature teaches us about something inside our nature. Poetry has a way of bringing both to light, as Percy Bysshe Shelley does here in Ode to the West Wind. In it, he describes the West Wind, a portent of Autumn, with all the leaves dying and falling off the trees, and the wind sweeping them clean off the landscape. The coming of winter reminds Shelley of his own limited time on earth. “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” he moans, longing for his boyhood. 

But there is a cycle at play in nature. Life gives way to death. Death, in turn, gives way to life. Like Shakespeare’s sonnets that proclaim the way to immortality it through the immortal word, Shelley beseeches the West Wind to “Drive my dead thoughts over the universe.”

I think this poem’s message, that even “dead thoughts” can be given new life through scattering words among mankind, is very interesting when you compare it to another of Shelley’s works, Ozymandias:

Source: http://architecture.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/ozymandias1.jpg

 

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

Being the sneaky literature fiend that I am, I used Ozymandias as the introduction to a history paper I wrote once on the influence of Occidentalism on the European Romantic Movement. Yep, I was pretty pedantic back then. 

Ozymandias is about a traveler* from an antique land who finds a decrepit statue half-buried in the sand, on a pedestal proclaiming the might of a long-forgotten king. 

So which is it? Do our written words provide us with some immortality? Or will they only serve as pitiful reminders to the future, that someone once existed who thought their ideas would live forever?