My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O wind,
If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’
In the ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ written in a wood washed by the Arno waters, how completely his spirit loses itself in and is identified with the forces of Nature! how in every line we feel the sweep and motion of the strong libeccio coming from the grey Atlantic, over ‘the sapless foliage of the ocean,’ to