The poem "Ode to the West Wind," written by Percy Bysshe Shelley is filled with sleep images, sickness images and death images. The speaker in the poem talks of the power of nature, a very romantic idea. It includes the romantic notion that nature is a place of harmony and a place of sensual pleasures. It is also the romantic belief that excessive reason is bad and one should look toward nature for the truth.
             The poem starts with alliteration the "wild West Wind," this describing the wind itself, which is the subject of the poem. The speaker refers to the wind as an "unseen presence," which gives the illusion that it is from the celestial realm. He then goes on to describe the power of the wind through a simile, where he says the leaves "Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing." Again the speaker puts the wind into the non-physical world by describing the wind using words such as "breath", "unseen presence", and "enchanter". At the end of the first stanza, the speaker again talks about the wind, as a celestial being when he describes the wind as a "Wild Spirit" and says this spirit is everywhere. He then comments on the power of the wind when he describes it as a "Destroyer and Preserver." He ends the first part in the fifth stanza with an apostrophe. The speaker speaks to the West Wind, and asks this higher force to listen to his plea.
             The second section of the poem deals with the wind as being a power of the wind in the heavens. He begins the second section of the poem by saying that the wind is "'mid the steep sky's commotion." Here he is commenting on the winds power by describing the commotion the wind produces. He then uses an image of death in describing the leaves as "decaying leaves", giving us the image of a dead decaying body. Here the speaker is trying to display the strength and destructiveness of the wind. It gives the reader a sense of the strength that the wind beholds. The wind is bein...