Identify the figure of speech in each of the following quotations from "Ode to the West Wind" by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Explain what he is saying in...

It is common for writers to find that they can no longer recognize their own thoughts after they have written them and some time has passed. Shelley is referring to the thoughts he has published which hopefully will seem fresh to others although they seem outdated to him because he has now gone further in the life of the mind. He is, of course, comparing his published writings with the dead leaves that are being...

It is common for writers to find that they can no longer recognize their own thoughts after they have written them and some time has passed. Shelley is referring to the thoughts he has published which hopefully will seem fresh to others although they seem outdated to him because he has now gone further in the life of the mind. He is, of course, comparing his published writings with the dead leaves that are being blown helter-skelter by the West Wind.

What Shelley means by the West Wind wakening the Mediterranean from his summer dreams is simply that the Mediterranean is typically extremely placid during the summer months, but it can become turbulent in the fall and winter. "Wakening" means forming white caps and waves. The Mediterranean can be dangerous for sailors. Most of Homer's Odyssey is about the struggles Ulysses had with the god of the sea who was trying to prevent him from returning home after the Trojan War. Shelley himself was drowned while sailing on the Mediterranean in a storm shortly before his thirtieth birthday. He seems to have foretold his own death in the last stanza of "Adonais," the poem he wrote as an elegy to John Keats:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
The massy earth and spheréd skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar!
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.