Summary
Now, the speaker begins to reveal more about his personal attachment to the wind and what it symbolizes: change and revolution. He laments that he is not a dead leaf, cloud, or wave, as, if he were, he would be carried or pushed by the wind. This would allow him to "share / The impulse of thy strength" (have some of the power of the wind), though he admits he would still be "less free / Than thou." Here, the speaker calls the wind "O, uncontrollable!," an echo of the first line of the poem, "O Wild West Wind."
The speaker goes on to reflect on his life, saying that he wishes he still felt as free as he did in his childhood. Back then, he says, he joined the wind in its journeys across the sky, and he felt like he could move even faster than the wind. The speaker says that if he were as he was back then, he would not need to plead with the wind as he is doing in this poem. Then, he turns to the wind, asking it to lift him up because he has become stuck on the "thorns of life"—the challenges associated with aging and living in modern society.
Finally, the speaker laments that aging has trapped him and taken his dignity, though he repeats that he was once as free and proud as the wind.
Analysis
One must understand the extent of the speaker's anguish to fully appreciate his plea for help. We are given this context in the fourth section, which offers the poem's first real insight into its speaker. Notably, the poetic "I" appears for the first time here, right away on the first line of the section. In telling us about his childhood, the speaker helps us better understand his personal connection to the subject of the poem. It becomes clear that something profound has been lost—that as a boy, he had felt that he was as fast and free as the wind, and he now finds himself trapped on the "thorns of life" in comparison. This tension between past and present fills out the characterization of the speaker.
A newfound urgency emerges from the speaker's plea due to what we learn in this section. Suddenly, it is clear why the speaker is so desperate for the winds of change to sweep over him. In fact, through the use of the "thorns of life" metaphor, the speaker casts himself as a Biblical figure, suggesting that his present status is equivalent to death, and the kind of change he is asking for would be tantamount to a resurrection.
As poet Michael O'Neill points out in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the melancholy tone of this section is emphasized by a few of its formal features. First, the section relies on monosyllabic stressed words, a contrast to the more fluid polysyllabic passages that precede it. This causes the reader to plod along awkwardly as they advance through the section. Additionally, O'Neill calls attention to the "tensely rhymed relationship" between the words "Heaven" and "striven," which contribute to the section's sense of uneasiness.
