English Literature / Unit 13 ENL 1242 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Shelley Lyric
The idea
Shelley's lyrics move fast and aim high, so read for three things. First, find the natural force the poem invokes: wind, skylark, cloud, mountain. Shelley treats it as a power beyond the human, destroying and renewing, or singing an unmixed joy. Second, find the speaker's relation to that power; often he asks to become its instrument, "Make me thy lyre," or contrasts its purity with human mixed feeling. Third, look for the political or prophetic hope beneath the imagery: the West Wind's scattered words become "The trumpet of a prophecy," and the poet, in the Defence, becomes an unacknowledged legislator. Notice also the forms, terza rima in the West Wind and the sonnet in "Ozymandias" and "England in 1819." Then state what change the poem hopes for and what power it calls on to make it.
In practice
Force, the speaker's plea, the prophecy.
Where people slip
Shelley's nature poems are often political. Do not read the West Wind as only a description of weather.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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