Welcome back to the Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Percy Shelley, a romantic poet, an English romantic poet who lived from 1792 to 1822.

He has our featured poet of the week, if you will.

In fact, all week long, I'm reading the five different parts of Ode to the West Wind,

one for each day of the week.

And today being Wednesday, that means that today is time for part three of this classic poem.

So I'm going to dive right into it.

Here is part three of Ode to the West Wind by Shelley.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams the blue Mediterranean, where he lay, lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams, beside a pumice aisle in Bayey's Bay, and saw in sleep old palaces and towers quivering within

the waves in tenser day.

All overgrown with azure, moss, and flowers so sweet the scent faints picturing them.

Thou for whose path the Atlantic's level powers cleave themselves into chasms, while far below the sea blooms and the oozy woods which wear the sapless foliage of the ocean, know thy voice,

and suddenly grow gray with fear and tremble and despoil themselves. Oh, here.

So in each of the first two stanzas, we've been talking about the different kind of effect

or influence that the wind, the West wind in particular, has on nature.

Here we're getting water.

What is the wind due to the water?

What is it due to the sea?

In some ways, this is just my favorite part of the poem because the pacing of it tends to change.

Even this very first stanza, we get a different,

we get a sleepier, a sleepier sense to this poem.

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