Explain: “There are spread ............ The locks of the approaching storm.”

Explain:

“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.”

Answer: These lines are quoted from the second stanza of Shelley's Ode to the West Wind. Here the poet describes in powerful images the impetuous rush of the west wind through the sky. The wind blows at first through a clear blue sky which is not clouded. But the gale gathers all the vapours and clouds in the horizon and they form a black mass stretching from the horizon to the highest point in the sky. The sky is darkened and all spaces are filled with clouds. The wavy clouds are imagined by the poet as the locks of the approaching storm-god. The picture recalls to the mind of Shelley the classical imagery of the Maenads, who were the female worshippers of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine. As these female worshippers of Bacchus danced about in their frenzy and killed the wild animals as sacrifices to their god, their hair was tossed up, giving them a fierce look. Similarly, the wild masses of clouds wavy and shaken look like the wild dishevelled hairs on the head of some fierce intoxicated female worshipper of Bacchus.

Here the wind is pictured in its stormy and terrible aspect. It gives a magnificent image of riotous elemental confusion. First there are the 'tangled boughs of heaven and ocean'; then the whole sky becomes the vast stage which is occupied by a single gigantic actor in the person of 'some fierce Maenad' whose locks are the full sky in storm. Here Shelley stresses the terrifying powers of destruction symbolised by the west wind.