This year, 2022, marks the bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death. Over all the two hundred years, countless fine lines of poetry written by Shelley have continously inspired people to rekindle the fire of hope. But of them all, a particular line from Ode to the West Wind may be the most significant one - “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”. This single line of verse is far more than a rhetorical question concerning the change of seasons, instead, it is as the poet states, a divine prophecy given to those people trapped in states of despair and desolation.
Ode to the West Wind consists of five cantos written in terza rima, originally invented by Dante Alighieri and first used in his grand epic poem La Comedia. Apart from the inherited rhyming scheme, there is another deeper layer of connnection between The Divine Comedy and this poem written by Shelley. Winter, like Dante’s Inferno, symbolizes death, while spring, the epitome of Dante’s Paradiso, symbolizes rebirth. Just like withered leaves blasted by the wild west wind are scattered all over the place to quicken a potential new burst of vitality in the upcoming spring, all those terrible sufferings Dante witnesses in Hell also lead him up to a more comprehensive understanding of Life, Light and Love, granting him the vision which enables the once lost Florentine to climb up mount Purgatory and eventually reach the gate of Paradise. Both of these masterpieces produced in Italy implies a universal truth, that descent is also ascent and death actually heralds rebirth.
Shelley embraced his own death two hundred years ago, drowned sailing in a tempest, but just as shown by the words engraved on his tombstone, a famous line from Shakespeare’s Tempest - “Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange”, there have indeed risen a thousand beacons from the spark he bores.