Much of the literary work that emerged from the Romantic period focused on images of nature and the strong emotions they evoked; the works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley are no exception. Both written in 1819 and published in 1820, Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" and John Keats' "To Autumn" offer elaborate, emotionally charged images of autumn through odes centered on the use of the apostrophe. However, the similarities shared by these two poems are largely outweighed by their differences; “Ode to the West Wind” and “To Autumn” differ greatly in both tone and overall message. While Keats celebrates the arrival of autumn, framing his presentation of the season with ideas of life and prosperity, Shelley laments it, seeing autumn not as a beginning in itself, but as the bitter end of spring . In these poems, both of which describe autumn or some aspect of it, autumn is presented from two very different perspectives: one as a bringer of life and the other as a symbol of death. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay "Ode to the West Wind" by Shelley, which addresses a wind described in the first line of the poem as the "breath of Autumn Being" (line 1), characterized by beginning to end with a tone filled with darkness and negativity. The speaker begins the poem with a comparison between falling and death, thus setting the stage for the jarring morbidity with which the poem is imbued throughout. The poem begins with a reference to the wind to which the title refers, "from whose invisible presence the dead leaves are driven away, like the ghosts of a fleeing enchanter" (lines 2-3). Here, the image of fleeing ghosts conveys an immediate sense of icy darkness, accompanying the direct reference to the idea of ​​death with which the speaker so clearly associates the fall. The image of dead, ghostly leaves serves as a tangible symbol for the more abstract concept of falling as a whole, which the poem insists on representing through the lens of death and sadness. Even the most seemingly positive remark the speaker makes about autumn is inherently negative, when he refers to "a deep autumnal tone, gentle though in sadness" (lines 60-61), a sadness that one can assume after reading the stanzas leading up to this point, is extremely sad. “Ode to the West Wind” becomes more and more morbid as it continues. The speaker does not simply use the image of death as a method of signifying an end; it is a symbol that he develops into an increasingly dark one as he continues to offer details about the illness. For example, he describes the “hectic yellow, black, pale, and red multitudes, / plague-stricken multitudes” (lines 4-5). These references to the plague and the intense red of the fever caused by tuberculosis contribute to an image of the fall not only as a form of death, but also as a contagious disease that infects the natural world until it is left “like a corpse in its grave”. (line 8). It is lines like these, as well as references to the autumn winds as "dirge / Of the dying year" (lines 23-24), that go beyond the abstract concept of death to offer concrete details that leave the reader with a feeling of horror. a feeling of darkness and morbidity. Together, these lines evoke in the reader an image of autumn as a kind of funeral procession, mourning the "corpse" of the earth as it transitions into the even greater darkness of winter..