The Dramatic Lyric [‘Ode to the West Wind’] 1

In the Ode to the West Wind, Shelley shapes a dramatic voice that first gives form to an ideology of social renewal and then mimes the process of its dissemination. The dramatic lyric does not express emotion; rather it is a public representation of emotion and of the self, a mimesis in which what would otherwise be absent is given presence, a presence, however, whose ontological status must remain uncertain. In the Ode to the West Wind, the ritual action is provided by the repetition and modification of metaphorical presences that illustrate the influence of the wind. The poem begins by presenting a self in communion with nature, but as it develops, this self is dramatized in a context of repeated action and in accordance with a conventional decorum. In Shelley's dramatic lyrics, the drama of the myth-making speaker evokes a corresponding psychodrama in the audience in which the speaker's improvisations become the prototypes of a new my thus.