The speaker prays to the west wind to make him its lyre.
A lyre is an ancient musical instrument, kind of like a small U-shaped harp. Lyres had special resonance for poets such as Shelley, as in Ancient Greece, poems would often be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. This is where we get the word "lyric" from, as in the lyrics of a song, or lyric poetry.
Shelley invokes the west wind as a metaphor for his own art. He hopes that the wind, his poetic sensibility, if you will, will stir up his dead thoughts like withered leaves and drive them across the universe to quicken a new spring—that is, spark his imagination into life. Shelley yearns for the west wind, his poetic faculty, to play him in order to create great poetry, just as the wind plays the lyre to make sweet music.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45134/ode-to-the-west-wind
Monday, September 5, 2016
What is Percy Shelley's prayer to the west wind?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
What is the theme of the chapter Lead?
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
The statement "Development policy needs to be about poor people, not just poor countries," carries a lot of baggage. Let's dis...
-
"Mistaken Identity" is an amusing anecdote recounted by the famous author Mark Twain about an experience he once had while traveli...
-
Primo Levi's complex probing of the Holocaust, including his survival of Auschwitz and pre- and post-war life, is organized around indiv...
-
De Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman was enormously influential. We can see its influences on early English feminist Mary Woll...
-
As if Hamlet were not obsessed enough with death, his uncovering of the skull of Yorick, the court jester from his youth, really sets him of...
-
In both "Volar" and "A Wall of Fire Rising," the characters are impacted by their environments, and this is indeed refle...
No comments:
Post a Comment