ANON WAS AN ENVIRONMENTALIST 33people long to go on pilgrimage.” From Chaucer to Bob Dylan, a wind promises
change: “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.” And the freshening
rain? Perhaps mercy, or sensual release.
Looking into turns of craft keeps us close to a poem—which is good. At
some point we step back to look at the structure, even of a four-line lyric. First
comes an imploring prayer, a question:
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?Then an oath, an exclamation:
Christ! if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!Yoking these two kinds of speech strikes a progression: question answered by
exclamation—a drama of its own.
And whose drama? So far we ’ve heard this anonymous lyric without pin-
pointing the person behind it. Who is saying “Christ! if my love were in my
arms”? A straw vote, even nowadays, would elect a man: voyager, rough oath,
sexual assertion, claiming a voice. But why so? “Anon was a woman,” Virginia
Woolf once said, and that might hold for “Western Wind.” Setting it to music,
Igor Stravinsky brilliantly solves the question by casting the whole poem for not
one but two voices, tenor and soprano interweaving “wind” and “rain,” “my
arms” and “my bed again!” A good way to sing love into nature.
Lasting ten seconds, the simplest words have lasted centuries, joining nature ’s
force to human feeling through a silent metaphor. “Western Wind” holds the
germ of much poetry to come.