This poem is a highly controlled text about the role of the poet as the agent of political and moral change. This was a subject Shelley wrote a great deal about, especially around 1819, with this strongest version of it articulated the last famous lines of his “Defense of Poetry”: “Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehend inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” (1819: 260)

The poem Ode to the West Wind consists of five cantos written in terza rima. Each canto adopts four tercets (ABA, BCB, CDC, DED) and a rhyming couplet (EE). The Ode is written in iambic pentameter.

The poem begins with three cantos describing the wind’s effects upon the earth, the air, and the ocean. The last two cantos are Shelley speaking directly to the wind, asking for its power, to lift him like a leaf, a cloud or a wave and make him its companion in its wanderings. He asks the wind to take his thoughts and spread them all over the world so that the youth are awoken with his ideas. The poem ends with an optimistic note which is that if winter days are here then spring is not very far. 从改写理论看诗歌翻译雪莱《西风颂》汉译本对比分析(3):http://www.751com.cn/yingyu/lunwen_37468.html