Vishnu and Siva

In many ways, Shelley often acts as Siva and Vishnu when he writes. Every Shelley poem we have read so far focuses on the importance of paradoxes. For example, in the “Ode to the West Wind” the speaker says that the winter prepares for spring and later that sorrow prepares a way for joy. The wind brings about these seasons and changes, which makes the wind both a preserver of beauty and harmony. Unlike Wordsworth’s usually comforting imagery and inspirational thoughts on nature, Shelley addresses the fact that nature is a preserver (as Wordsworth points out often) but nature is also a destroyer. When winter is here, spring is always following closely behind, and the wind takes winter away in order to bring spring back.  

Similarly to “To a Sky-lark”, Shelley begs the ‘spirit’ in the poem, in this case the West wind, to teach him how to be like the wind. He shows a need for this understanding and begs for the wind to make him its lyre with hopes of eventually becoming the wind. If Shelley were to take on this position, he too would be the preserver and the destroyer. He cannot beg for nature’s gifts without accepting the complicated duality of it.

In his writing Shelley attempts to be like the West wind by showing presence through absence or through paradox. I believe Shelley thought of poets as paradoxes as well. He believed nature was a powerful thing that humans could never fully understand, this is especially conveyed in “Mont Blanc.” He personifies the mountain because it is so vast and inexplicable in any other form. Later in the poem though, Shelley questions what nature would be without man to perceive it. This is a very complicated paradox where poets (and people) are nothing without nature and nature is nothing without it. This is not to say that either is equivalent. Shelley makes certain to point out that the one of the only contributions that can be made by people is to stand in utter awe of nature yet nature is timeless and powerful and serves as an element of inspiration and destruction.