An Analysis of Ode to the West Wind Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" seems more complex at first than it actually is because the poem is structured in much like a long, complex sentence in which the main clause does not appear until the last of five fourteen-line sections. The main idea of ​​the poem is held in suspense for 56 lines before the reader sees exactly what Shelley is saying to the West Wind and why he is saying it. In the first four sections Shelley addresses the west wind in three different ways, each evoking the power and beauty of the wind. And each section ends with Shelley asking the West Wind to "hear, oh hear!" The reader's curiosity is thus simultaneously aroused and suspended, because we know that the west wind should "feel" something, but we are not told what it should feel or what it should do. The first stanza develops the idea of ​​the effect of the west wind on autumn leaves. The associations we automatically make with autumn – the end of the year, the death of the year's life, the beginning of winter – are important, but equally important are other life-giving aspects of wind energy. Shelley tells us that the wind not only blows the "yellow, black, pale, and red / pestilence-stricken multitudes" (4, 5) of autumn leaves, but also "Chariotest to their dark and winter bed/ The winged seeds" (6 , 7) which will remain dormant all winter until the spring breeze&emdash; "Your blue sister of spring" (9) blows over the landscape to awaken life in it. The west wind pushes the dead leaves, but also scatters the seeds which will then give new life to the world. This life-giving aspect of the west wind seems significant, but the reader still cannot understand why Shel… in the center of the paper… in the minds of his readers. But readers are difficult to reach, insensitive. To a poet fighting for an audience, as Shelley did, it may seem that winter is coming. It took a lot of faith to believe that spring would come. The west wind is a revitalizing force, something that can (metaphorically if not literally) propel his poetry to a new birth in whatever spring lies ahead: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?” (70) It is the poet's call for a rebirth of energy. We don't know for sure whether the poet's energy was sapped by the struggle to make his voice heard, but we do know that for much of Shelley's career he struggled with the depressing sense that no one was reading him. In any case, this powerful natural force becomes for Shelley the symbol of a power capable of chasing away the death of the year, its profound depression, and planting the seeds for a rebirth..