Welcome back to the Daily Poem here in the Close to Reads Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

As has been the case all week, this poem today is by Percy Shelley. He was an English romantic poet who lived from 1792 to 1822.

You might know him for his classic poem like like Ozzamandius, or perhaps to a Skylark,

or, you know, any number of other poems.

But this week, I have been reading all five parts of his classic Ode to the West Wind.

Today's Thursday, which means that we are on part four.

This is how that part goes.

If I were a dead leaf, thou mightest bear.

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee,

a wave to pant beneath thy power,

and share the impulse of thy strength, only less free than thou,

oh, uncontrollable, even if I were, as in my boyhood, and could be the comrade of thy wanderings

over heaven, as then when to outstrip thy sky-y speed scarce seemed a vision.

I would ne'er have striven as thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud.

I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed.

A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed one too like the,

tameless and swift and proud.

So I mentioned that each of the first three stanzas ends in a very similar way.

There's a consistency there.

It ends with the call, oh, here.

But here in part four, we get something new.

...