ANON WAS AN ENVIRONMENTALIST 31i-sounds reverberate in Keats’s Grecian urn, a “bride of quietness, / Thou
foster-child of silence and slow time.” Like them, “Western Wind” gathers
momentum from five bright vowel-sounds: “Christ! if my love were in my
arms, / AndIinmybed again!”
Along with vibrant vowels, “Western Wind” gains from its rhymes, espe-
cially if “rain” brings out the British pronunciation of “again.” “Rhyme” or
“rime” has always been a word for poem (though not all poems rhyme). Here
rhyming drives home the aim of “Western Wind.” Just as rhymes are sounds
that come back again, this saga aims at getting back home.
Stanza, rhythm, meter, sound, rhyme: absolutely essential. Now what about
the plain (or not so plain) meaning of the words? “Western wind, when will thou
blow”: “thou” takes only a quick light stress but transforms the whole poem’s
stance. Nowadays archaic, “thou” has a revealing lineage. Adam, Cain, Abra-
ham, Moses, Elijah, David, Solomon, Job, Jeremiah, the Psalmist all intimately
address their Creator. Shelley’s “Wild West Wind” he calls “Thou,” as Keats
does the nightingale and most poignantly, Autumn:
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.Calling the wind “thou,” anonymous lines take a personal standpoint, give the
wind mythic presence, and bring it close, binding us to nature as language itself
always has since Adam, Noah, and all early peoples.
Another small word, the “small” rain, may mean light or slender, a steady
drizzle. And oddly in so brief a phrase, “rain” falls twice: “The small rain down
can rain.” Only in English can a single word, such as “rain” or “stone,” double
as noun and verb (and adjective too). Here in one breath, “rain” turns active!
Matter gains energy, marked by a ringing of final consonants, “raindowncan
rain.”
“Christ!,” the very next word, carries extra clout. Centuries ago it was no
empty profanity. Oaths could still summon a sacred presence onto the scene:
“Christ! if my love were in my arms.” As in the urge for rain, grammar kicks in,
a subjunctive verb yearning for what ’s absent: “Christ! if [only] my love were
in my arms, / And I [were] in my bed again!” The rhythm needs both those
tightenings, to press toward love and home.
At first glance this poem’s halves have nothing to do with each other. The
lines on wind and rain occur in nature, with nothing human (though some-
one must be speaking them). Those on love utter purely human concerns. No
transition binds them, their joining’s unexpected and unexplained (as in much
poetry since T. S. Eliot). Yet despite—and because of—that gap, we make the
leap ourselves: wind to longing, rain to loving.