¹ E. M. W. Tillyard, one of Shelley's defenders, writes: “The reason why of all Shelley's lyrics the Ode to the West Wind is the most powerful is that as well as containing the qualities common to most of Shelley's other ambitious lyrics it is much more masterfully shaped” (Milton [London, 1930], p. 240). This seems to imply that most of Shelley's lyrics are not “masterfully shaped.” Perhaps it should be explained that this article was not occasioned by recent criticisms of Shelley, does not attempt to answer these criticisms or to defend Shelley, and does not assume that poetry which makes use of devices such as are considered here is necessarily good or is better than poetry which does not employ them.

² Each of these spondees consists of an adjective followed by a noun which is the name of a'natural object or force.

³ To carry out the pattern completely the fifth line should also have a dissyllable instead of two monosyllables before its final word.

⁴ Imaginary Conversations: “Southey and Landor”, Complete Works, ed. T. Earle Welby (London, 1927), v, 287.

⁵ C. D. Locock (Poems of Shelley [London, 1911], ii, 280, 529), following Mrs. Shelley's second collected edition (1839), prints them as two.

⁶ The first line consists of an anapest and an iamb or spondee except in the two last half stanzas where it has two anapests. The second line has three anapests except in lines eight and twenty-three, where a spondee or iamb is substituted for one of the anapests. The first syllable of the anapests often has a secondary accent. This analysis assumes that “Heaven”, “given”, and “ours” have two syllables, and “overpowers” four, because otherwise the longer lines in which they are the last words would not, like the remaining longer lines in the poem, have feminine endings. It likewise assumes that “hour” is a dissyllable, since otherwise the last foot of line fourteen would not, like the last foot in the seven other longer lines, be an anapest.

⁷ I have followed W. M. Rossetti, who, according to Locock (n, 522), in his 1870 edition of Shelley's Poetical Works, “presumably on the authority of the Trelawny MS”, transposed lines 2 and 3 from the order in which they are usually printed.

⁸ The final line of the second stanza continues the thought of the preceding line and does not carry out the pattern.

⁹ Somewhat as each succeeding question which the lover addresses the bird in Poe's Raven gains in tenseness (see Poe's explanation of the poem in “The Philosophy of Composition”).

¹⁰ That is, when he used them deliberately; but he scattered them freely and without special intent through all his poems, whether narrative, dramatic, or lyric, whether written in blank verse, stanzas, terza rima, heroic or octosyllabic couplets.

¹¹ In Love's Philosophy, which has a similar theme, feminine endings a used in all but two lines of the first stanza and in all but the last four of the second. All nine lines of the fragment A Roman's Chamber, which begins like a Gothic tale, have feminine rimes. Prometheus Unbound, i, 86-90, and the first four lines of the two opening choruses and all the first semichorus i of Hellas (1-4, 14-17, 34-37) have unstressed endings, while Prometheus Unbound, n.iv.l63-ii.v.5, and Hellas, 94-109, alternate unstressed with stressed endings.

¹³ Stanzas vi, xin, xvii, xrx, i.e., lines 26, 28, 61, 63, 81, 83, 91, 93.

¹⁴ Tillyard, who knows the skylark better than I do, says that in Shelley's lyric it is “the symbol of unquenchable energy, after which the poet aspires”—Poetry: Direct and Oblique (London, 1934), p. 164. This may well be what the lark symbolizes to Tillyard, but in Shelley's lyric I find no suggestion of “unquenchable energy” except as that enters into joy.

¹⁵ In the second stanza, and possibly in the ninth, all the rimes are feminine, and the effect is not happy.

¹⁶ He does this in lines 33, 71, 73, 74, 86, 87.

¹⁷ The two monosyllables instead of a dissyllable in the fifth line of Rough wind, the threefold use of two words in place of one in the third couplet of Music, when, the final line of stanza two and most of stanza three of Swifter far, and the cadence together with the beginning of the first and third lines of the last stanza of Tell me.

¹⁸ Karl Shapiro writes: “There are three statements I wish to make about the scope of prosody: (1) that every poem has a discoverable organization; (2) that the poet is only slightly more aware of this organization than the reader; (3) that the intimate knowledge of this total structure does not necessarily contribute to what we call our appreciation of the poem”—“Prosody as the Meaning”, Poetry, lxxiii (March, 1949), 344.