The nonviolent resistance to violent attempts at suppression, which underpins Shelley’s poem, would later influence Mahatma Gandhi’s own philosophy of nonviolent protest. 15 people were killed, and hundreds injured. The crowd were protesting over famine and poor economic conditions in the north of England in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. Sometimes called ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, this political poem was written in response to the above-mentioned Peterloo Massacre, when cavalry charged a group of some 60,000 protesters (some accounts put the figure as high as 80,000) in St. The west wind thus becomes, before Harold Macmillan, a ‘wind of change’. The west wind is the wind that would carry Shelley back from Florence (where he was living at the time) to England, where he wanted to help fight for reform and revolution. Written in 1819 during a turbulent time in English history – the Peterloo Massacre, which Shelley also wrote about in his poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, deeply affected the poet – this classic ode is one of Shelley’s best-known poems. Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves deadĪre driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, So begins this poem, sometimes titled ‘Mutability’ (though Shelley, confusingly, wrote another poem called ‘Mutability’), which is one of Shelley’s most widely anthologised poems and a classic example of the carpe diem or ‘seize the day’ poem. As so often with Romantic poetry, the self of the poet, the stuff of poetic creativity, the individual soul of the artist, is at one with nature’s awe-inspiring beauty and majesty. Shelley’s poem is as much about poetic inspiration as it is about the bird itself.

Mary later described the circumstances that gave rise to the poem: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark.’ The opening line of the poem gave Noel Coward the title for his play Blithe Spirit. The inspiration for the poem was an evening walk Shelley took with his wife, Mary, in Livorno, in north-west Italy. Shelley completed this, one of his most famous poems, in June 1820. And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest …

MVP* by John Shelley