It was while lying in a grove on the banks of the Arno, near Florence, that he wrote the most magnificent of his poems, the _Ode to the West Wind_.
In its first stanza the wind is the breath of autumn, driving the dead leaves, "yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, pestilence-stricken multitudes"; and of spring, filling "with living hues and odours plain and hill"--we hear it blowing, and we hear its echo in the appealing refrain: "Hear, oh hear!"
In the second stanza we are again reminded of the old mythologies, when the poet sings of the loose clouds on the Wind's stream, "shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean," and of "the locks of the storm" spread on the blue surface of the airy surge "like the bright hair uplifted from the head of some fierce Mænad."
But along with the breath of the West Wind we have Shelley's whole soul in the final outburst:
"Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed! A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed One too like thee--tameless, and swift, and proud.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own? The tumult of thy mighty harmonies Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce, 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?"
Compare this Ode with the beautiful passage in the Third Canto of _Childe Harold_, in which Byron cries:
"Could I embody and unbosom now That which is most within me,--could I wreak My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak, All that I would have sought, and all I seek, Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe--into one word, And that one word were Lightning, I would speak; But as it is, I live and die unheard, With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."
Or with his apostrophe to night, during the wild storm on the Lake of Geneva:--