Thursday, November 21, 2019

The Garden of the Seasons: Looking at Winter, Shelley Had Big Plans for Spring

   
       It's looking wintry out there. 
          As somebody who makes a big fuss out of fall, I really need to be taking these changes in better stride. Autumn is indeed the 'fall of the year.' 
           Not just leaves. Temperatures are falling. And daylight is diminishing daily, nightly, before our eyes. 
           The world grows quiet. Where are all those crickets and cicadas that made that enchanting 'Change is in the air/ Hurry up!/Hurry up!' music at the close of each fading day, singing us into the softer beauties of the autumn eves?... Well, don't ask. 
          So, with these facts well in possession by anybody with experience of a few go-rounds in a temperate climate, what did we expect to come next? 
          And did I say 'quiet'? Where are the birds? Some are still with us, bearing up with their animal pluck in nature's Hotel Winter, not audibly complaining (more than I can say for us two-legged types).
          Some of the feathered friends that are often still with us this time of year, and checking the place out for daily meals, have apparently made the decision to look elsewhere this year, since we were so late to begin filling the feeder. We filled it for the first time just last Sunday. 
           Score so far: handful of chickadees.
           Such observations on our wintry outlook, abetted by cold and damp each day this week, lead to the state of mind in which (quotes start here) we "We look before and after,
And pine for what is not"
...to borrow a few words from the poet who will supply us with a good deal more shortly.
            As for looking back, this is a fond occupation (I am told) of advancing years. 
           (Laughter off.) 
            Perhaps even more universal is our tendency to look forward to the next desired status. Having "something to look forward to" seems to be a pretty universal desire. My mother used to say of one or another prospective gathering: "it's something to look forward to."
            Even in our happiest best of days, we keep an eye on something fun, desirable, or at least distracting -- coming up. See you, we say to friends or relations, at (or on) such and such.
           And pretty universally in the countries of our climate, when winter is full in the mirror (not yet, of course, in the present case) we look ahead to that something better that goes by the name of spring. 
          Here's the line of poetry that for most of us pretty accurately expresses that common feeling: 
"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" 

That oft repeated sentiment -- a one-sentence encapsulation of humanity's fundamental need for hope -- comes at the end of the poem, "Ode to the West Wind," written in Italy in 1819, when Percy Bysshe Shelly and his wife, Mary -- famous as the author of "Frankenstein" -- were living in a town near Florence, Italy. 
         The West Wind of the poem's conception is a cleansing autumn wind, taking away the "withered leaves" of the old year and preparing the ground for the birth of a new spring. 
          And in Shelley's poem it's an allegorical wind, driving away a despair that the poet strongly associates with the political decadence and injustice of  his own country, England. He has fled England, where his works have been censured and he is liable to prosecution for "blasphemy" -- by criticizing orthodox Christianity -- and "sedition" in condemning both his country's form of government, a monarchy dominated by the upper class, and particular politicians who serve the ends of the entrenched status quo and are blind to the needs and aspirations of the great mass of the common people.
          His sonnet "England in 1819" bluntly summarizes his view of the English political system at that time:

"Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know
But leechlike to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow"...
          I find a bitter satisfaction in reading these words about another time and place, the England of exactly 200 years ago, and transposing them to our own top rungs of government:
          "rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know"...? 
          Yep, sounds about right to me. 

          The final section of "Ode to the West Wind" best expresses the poet's root notion of a strongly cleansing wind, imploring the West Wind to make use of his own sad thoughts (equated with falling leaves) to achieve "a deep, autumnal tone,/ sweet though in sadness... Be thou me, impetuous one!" 
            And, in the following lines:
            "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
             Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!"

Then in the ode's very last couplet the cleansing wind becomes "the trumpet of a prophecy!" 
          "O Wind," the poem appeals in its famous final line, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

As I take Shelley's meaning here, Spring -- and all it means: new birth, new season, new growth, flowers, green leaves, crops, food for the whole of earth's population -- doesn't just arrive by itself. 
            We have to clean all the crap out of the way first. The deadness -- physical and moral -- doesn't just disappear by magic. 
             That's why we need the cleansing West Wind. That's what the fresh 'wind' -- a word suggesting spirit, urge, energy, a strong popular movement (or whatever other interpretation we wish to give it) -- does. 
              And that's why this West Wind of Shelley's poetic conception speaks to me so strongly at this particular time in this sorrowful, sickening land of our own, stewing in its corruption, decadence, cruelty and blatant cold-heartedness toward those in need. 
              Also, frankly, it feels good simply to read, and re-read, a poem about hope.

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