Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!

These lines open Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), a lyric invocation addressed to the autumn wind. Shelley wrote the poem in Italy during a period of intense political disillusionment and personal strain, and the ode channels that turbulence into a ritual-like appeal to a natural force imagined as both violent and regenerative. The speaker calls on the West Wind as a roaming “Spirit” whose seasonal power strips the world down even as it prepares renewal. The apostrophic “hear, oh, hear!” establishes the poem’s prayerful, incantatory tone and frames the wind as an agent capable of answering human desire and transforming the poet’s voice.

The “Wild Spirit” is the West Wind personified as an elemental intelligence that moves through all realms—earth, sky, and sea—making it “moving everywhere.” Calling it both “Destroyer and preserver” captures Shelley’s central paradox: the same force that scatters dead leaves and drives storms also carries “seeds” toward future spring. The plea “hear, oh, hear!” signals that the poem is not mere description but a supplication for communion with power—an attempt to enlist nature’s cyclical energy for moral, imaginative, and (implicitly) political renewal. The lines set up the ode’s larger movement from observing the wind’s might to asking that might to animate the poet’s own words.