The definition of Romantic prophecy that my understanding of the writing is based on is Dr. Christopher Bundock’s that defines the term as writing that is important due to “how it thinks about history as an ongoing process of figuration and refiguration, as a thinking healthily suspicious of an ostensibly desirable apocalypse . . . that imposes the final, ‘true’ form on all life” (844). With Dr. Bundock’s definition in mind, I have come to think Romantic prophecy as poets looking back on history with different points of view, expressing some kind of judgment/opinion about the historical events or context, and sometimes expressing/dancing around their own desires and ideas within the poem. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” was very helpful in getting me to have some sort of understanding of Romantic prophecy.

In my personal interpretation, “Ode to the West Wind” has Percy Bysshe Shelley examining history in terms of weather, specifically the seasons. He is focused on how the seasons bring about different things in relation to nature. He also addressing the wind itself like it were a deity which becomes most important in the fifth canto. This canto is where I see Dr. Bundock’s idea of figuration and refiguration at work:

“Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling life its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

 

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

 

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

 

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to awakened Earth

 

The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” (ll. 57-70)

After already looking back and depicting the seasons as a continuous cycle, Percy Bysshe Shelley directly parallels human life with that of a trees in line 57-59. The parallel enables him to spring forward into demanding a kind of reincarnation like nature does throughout the seasons. He wants to continue into spring like earth and the nature get to and achieve perhaps a kind of immortality. Percy Bysshe Shelley, in short, wants to “refigure” his course of life that will end in death to a different course that the nature experiences. He does not want to end in winter, but instead hopes for spring, a season of rebirth and life.

With these traits expressed in the poem and especially in the last canto, Romantic prophecy is a poet turning their gaze back in history, taking it and turning it to fit their needs in order express something. They are not necessarily rewriting history, but instead recontextualizing and changing the meaning and understanding of the historical events. They do this to achieve their poetic goal, whatever that might be.

(Word count: 486)