I’ve never warmed to Shelley as a man, and when I’ve tried reading his poetry in bulk I’ve found the process curiously unsatisfying. This is odd: his writing shows staggering verbal power, and he clearly was a man of great intelligence as well as of what seem to me inspiring general principles. Let the psychologist, novelist or biographer explore relations between his genius and what seem like his emotional deficiencies. I want to glance at one tiny splinter illustrating his enormous gifts: not for the moment the superb ‘Ozymandias’, but a line from ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in which the brilliance is more purely verbal. I’ve italicised the line in question:

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion,
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aëry surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head

Of some fierce Maenad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith’s height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh hear!

I’ve tried to understand what makes ‘angels’ and ‘rain’ seem so radio-actively evocative in their context. Of course there’s sheer surprise at the sudden entry of a Judaeo-Christian metaphor, and the incongruous fusion of the bright, sunlit idea of angels with that of rain. However, I think it’s above all a matter of sound and rhythm. The ‘a’ sound stands out phonetically because it’s much more heavily stressed than the only previous occurrence in ‘decaying’. It’s also emphasised by the way the speaking voice moves into it. It seems to me to drop on the unstressed second syllable of ‘Ocean’, at what might well have been the end of a sentence; to gather itself in the following line and stanza break; then to explode into the marvellous ‘ANGels of rain and lightning’. Meter emphasises how ‘An-gels’ divides into two syllables, making us register the n and the soft g as separate consonant sounds, so that the voice seems to hang suspended for the fraction of a second in the middle of the word. This greatly heightens its sonic force and so underlines the leaping way in which disparate ideas come together or explode out of each other in the metaphor. ‘Angel’, from the Greek ‘???????’ or ‘messenger’ brilliantly infuses the literal fact of the clouds’ being forerunners of storm with ideas of divine presence and benevolent divine power. There’s a compressed drama to ‘Angels of rain and lightning’ – ‘angels’ creates a sense of anticipation; ‘rain and lightning’ of the actual arrival of the storm. ‘Rain’ is one of those odd words whose very sound seems impregnated with its meaning but the effect is especially intense here, perhaps because of the assonance between ‘angels’ and ‘rain’. Although in terms of the logic of what’s being said we’re still only anticipating the coming rain the imaginative impression the word gives is so strong that it feels as if the rain’s arrival is almost simultaneous with its annunciation.

All that seems to me true to the way the poem works, but what’s so dazzling about Shelley’s achievement here is what a tiny scratching at the complex life of the lines such an analysis is. Any inspection of details, it seems to me, merely paddles at one or another edge of what’s truly astounding about the poem, the dazzling speed and brilliant, instinctive adroitness with which it swerves and spins through cadences, sound patterns, metaphors and ideas. In the end, I think, all one can do is register one’s awe at such a brilliantly lit, sensuously evocative, ecstatic tumult of impressions and know that what makes it what it is is not any of the separate bits, anything that can be detached for inspection, but the sheer movement of the whole.