Summary
The speaker opens the poem by addressing the "wild" wind directly. He begins to describe the wind's activities in the fall, saying that it pushes the leaves off of the trees and carries winged seeds to the ground. The leaves are described in two ways: first as ghosts running away from a practitioner of magic, and second as a mass of sick people. The speaker states that the seeds will remain in the ground as if they are dead bodies until the spring. Then, when spring—imagined as a woman playing a trumpet over the Earth—does come, buds will sprout from the Earth like a flock of sheep. Spring will bring the Earth back to life, and it will fill with beautiful colors and smells.
In the section's final two lines, the speaker talks to the wind again, imploring it to listen to his words. He calls the wind "wild" again, says that it moves everywhere, and labels it "Destroyer and preserver"—annihilator and savior.
Analysis
The speaker introduces multiple themes in the first section that are essential in understanding the poem as a whole. First, we see that the "wild" aspect of the wind is particularly important to the speaker, as this word appears at the beginning and end of the section. The wind is free and unrestrained; the speaker simultaneously envies and admires this trait for reasons that will become clear later in the poem. For now, however, it is simply important to understand that the wind's freedom is central to how the speaker both imagines and portrays the west wind.
A series of metaphors further clarifies the speaker's attitudes toward the wind. The falling leaves are ghosts running away from a creature wielding magic; they are also a group of people ill with pestilence. Both of these metaphors reference death, aiding in the characterization of the wind. We see that to the speaker, the wind is inseparable from death. This is confirmed by another metaphor, which imagines seeds lying in the ground like corpses. Yet another metaphor, however, offers an opposing perspective. The speaker goes on to portray the spring wind as a woman who revives the Earth by sounding a "clarion," or a trumpet, which brings the buried buds back to life. For the first time, the wind is associated not with death but with life. It is a complex image that shifts the tone from purely melancholy to something closer to appreciative. The section closes with a couplet that, in the fashion of traditional sonnets, addresses the previous ten lines. "Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; / Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!" This is the essence of the wind as described in the section—it is "wild" and at once a "Destroyer and preserver." The groundwork is laid for the speaker to elaborate in later sections on the themes that he has created here.
