Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulcher.

This line is from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ode “Ode to the West Wind,” written in 1819 in Italy (commonly associated with Shelley’s time near Florence) and published in 1820 in the volume Prometheus Unbound, A Lyrical Drama, in Four Acts, With Other Poems. The poem addresses the West Wind as a powerful natural force that drives seasonal change, scattering dead leaves and storm-clouds while also carrying seeds that will germinate in spring. In the final section Shelley turns from description to invocation, asking the wind to act upon his own spirit and poetry, transforming personal and political despondency into renewed creative and prophetic energy.

Calling the wind a “dirge / Of the dying year” frames autumn’s gale as both music and funeral rite: the wind “sings” the year’s death as winter approaches. The image of “this closing night” becoming the “dome of a vast sepulcher” enlarges a single stormy evening into a cosmic burial chamber, suggesting that nature’s cycles are monumental and impersonal. Yet in Shelley’s ode, death is not final; it is part of a regenerative pattern in which decay prepares the ground for rebirth. The passage therefore balances elegy with latent hope, anticipating the poem’s later insistence that winter’s end implies spring’s return.