Explain: “Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! ......... One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”

Explain:

“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.”

Ans: Shelley cries out in the anguish of his heart in the fourth stanza of the Ode to the West Wind. After describing the powerful impact of the west wind on earth, sky and sea, the poet passes to his own self. He is in sore need of the energizing influence of the west wind. Life and society have dealt roughly with him. Abandoned by the society, howled down by the critics, the poet feels that he is bleeding on the thorns of life. The weight of miseries has bent him to the ground. Hence his passionate appeal to the storm to lift him in the same manner as it has lifted the leaves of trees, the clouds of the sky and the waves of the sea. He wants to share the impetuosity and strength of the west wind. The poet also finds an affinity between his own soul and the storm. He, too, was one proud, impetuous and swift, but all his energies have been sapped by his struggle with the society. Therefore, the poet makes a passionate appeal to the west wind to breathe into him its energizing power.

In this stanza, the poet's own sense of oppression and constraint is related to wind's freedom and strength. The poet makes a magnificent union of himself with Nature and then passes to equally great self- description. He thus mingles himself and Nature together.