Comparing Ode To The West Wind And Byron's Pilgrimage

The Gilded Age. The Progressive Era. The Roaring Twenties. The Space Race. The Reagan Era. What all five of these time periods have in common is that they were each diverse and defining movements that shaped American history as it is known today. In a similar way, the Romantic Age immensely affected, not just the literature of the time, but life as well in England; it brought a more adventurous, personal, and imaginative approach to both. The poetry written at this time were all strikingly similar in their content and particularly their emphasis on the ordinary man and his connection to and relationship with nature. Interestingly, beyond containing the basic similarities that all Romantic poetry shares, there are two poems in particular from this movement that are immensely similar. The powerful correlation between Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, when read together, allow readers to better grasp the emphasis the Romantic ideal of man’s personal and individual connection with nature and its power over man.
Firstly, both poems’ structure, that is their rhyme and meter, as well as both poems’ five content group division, allow for a smooth transition when reading the two poems together. While the two poems do not have identical different rhyme schemes, both poems are heavily iambic pentameter, with slight, yet purposeful variations. The fact that the two poems are the same meter, provides reasoning that they could

In fact, these poems are so similar, they could be compared to William Blake’s corollaries, which almost cannot be understood without its counterpart. Thus forcing readers to question why they would not initially read Shelley’s and Byron’s poems together in the first