Shelley a Rebel, Revolutionary and a Utopian Dreamer:

Shelley was a true-born kid of the revolution. The spirit of that revolution found its expression in Shelley’s poetry. Throughout his life he dreamt of a brand new society, a brand new world, completely free from tyranny and oppression. He was a dreamer of dreams and the sole fervid singer of the revolution.

Unlike Wordsworth or Coleridge, Shelley never abandoned the ideals of the revolution, though he was appalled by the dictatorship of Napoleon. Shelley only experienced the revolution at second hand through the books of the writers as Rousseau and William Godwin etc. When he looked back, all he could see was the flame of revolution still flickering in spite of the terror, war and disease. In his preface to “The Revolt of Islam”, he pointed out that the wanted to kindle in the bottom of his readers a virtuous enthusiasm for liberty and justice, which neither violence nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among mankind.

In another allegorical work “Prometheus Unbound” Shelley made his hero arch-rebel which stole the divine fire for humanity and was punished by Jupiter.  In the concluding stanza of the song there is a return of belief that Earth shall share in the emancipation of man:

“Where morning dyes her golden tresses,
Shall soon partake our high emotions;
Kings shall turn pale!” 

In his most cherished lyrical poems, ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘To a Skylark’ Shelley transcends all the limits and indeed explodes.  It is in these lyrics that we often find Shelley at his best. Indeed most of Shelley’s poems are sad in tone and as such he is regarded as “the singer of endless sorrows”.

In ‘Ode to West Wind’, the poet begins his invocation in a buoyant mood. He looks upon the Wind as the destroyer of the present order and usherer of a new one. He quickly introduces the theme of death and compares the dead leaves to ghosts. The way Shelley invokes to the West Wind and the imagery of "Pestilence-stricken multitudes" makes the reader well aware of Shelley’s imaginative powers.

Although the West Wind symbolizes his own personality, yet in the middle of the poem he seems somehow pessimistic when he says, "Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!/ I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" The subsequent thought of the future at once turns his melancholy into ecstatic rapture as he foresees the approaching happiness:

“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,”

The ecstasy arises out of his ardent belief in the imminent regeneration of mankind and the end of all evils. The West Wind acts as a driving force for change and rejuvenation in the human and natural world. He hopes that all forms of tyranny and oppression will be replaced, in the millennium to come, by all-round happiness. The joyous rapture is born of an intense feeling of optimism:

“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!”

We also find Shelley’s same revolutionary zeal in ode “To a Skylark”. In the opening stanza, the bird is seen as a "blithe spirit" that "pourest thy full heart/ In profuse strains of unpremeditated art." There is nothing artificial in the music of the bird; it overflows profusely from its heart. Shelley’s Skylark, is not just a bird but an embodiment of this ideal, the poet can hear its song but the bird ever remains invisible.

Among the Romantic poets, Shelley is marveled for his inimitable abstract ideas, but he is less of an artist .He was aiming not at the poetry of art, but at the poetry of rapture. Keats advised him to be “more an artist” and to “load every rift with ore”, but Shelley was aiming at a different effect from that of Keats’s richly decorated poetry. The poem” Ode to the West Wind” is universally accepted as one of the best poems in English literature remarkable for its theme, range of thought, spontaneity, poetic beauty and lyrical quality.

In his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, he describes it as the spirit of Beauty pervading the universe. He speaks of it as an “unseen power” that rarely visits human hearts as an “awful loveliness” that can free this world from tyranny and oppression. Thus, a profound note of yearning for the unattainable is another feature of Shelley’s poetry. According to Cazamian,

“The tone of Shelley’s poetry is that of a keen aspiration, in which mystical desire, with its anguished pangs and spiritual raptures, transcends the joys and sufferings of ordinary mankind.” Mathew Arnold very aptly refers to Shelley as “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”.

Shelly’s optimism about the imminent dawn of a golden age is genuine and firm and his prophecy of that millennium underlies most of his poems. In Ode to West Wind also this prophetic note is present with sheer intensity of expression:

“And, by the incarnation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Shelly’s personification of West Wind is equally forceful:

“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!”

Hand in hand with his irreconcilable spirit, is his utopian idealism? He wants to reconstitute society in keeping with his ideals of goodness, truth and beauty. According to Compton- Rickett, “To renovate the world, to bring about utopia, is his constant aim, and for this reason we may regard Shelley as … the visionary and reformer.”

Summing up, Shelley is emphatically the poet-militant, and the prophet of struggling manhood. His words are like trumpet-calls sounded in the van of man’s struggle, wafted back by winds, and heard through the din of conflict by his meaner brethren, who are obscurely fighting for good in the throng and crush of life. So he invokes the West Wind to become trumpet of his prophecy and scatter his revolutionary message that “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”