Ode to the West Wind에 나타난 Shelley의 사상에 대하여 = On Shelley’s Thought in His Ode to the West Wind

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study is to examine Shelley’s thought in the west wind as the objective correlative of a destroyer and a preserver in his Ode to the West Wind. It is, so to speak, to research the thoughts from the poet’s spiritual will, which are connected with the autumn west wind as the destroyer and the spring west wind as the preserver.
Shelley learned a deep and wide knowledge of his life concerning to the stance and the plight between man and man from the affliction of his personal miseries, and he tried to break down a thick wall between the actual and the ideal. Such his strong desire was spouted from Ode to the West Wind He wished eagerly a happy and peaceful world without fraud and hatred, poverty and suffering, and evilness and oppression in Ode to the West Wind.
In Ode to the West Wind, Shelley gathered, up the information of meteorology, botany, astronomy, aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics as a circumference in representing his will of spirit, or his thought. In the center of the circumference of the information, he spreaded and penetrated concretely the reformistic thought of ‘a destroyer’ and ‘a preserver’ into his west wind as the objective correlative.
Shelley took the dead leaves, the clouds, and the waves as the equivalents of the autumn west wind, but the pursuit of his ‘the thought of destroyer’ could be made through the dead leaves in chief with it. And he adopted the sky, the seeds, and the clarion as the equivalents of the spring west wind. The main aspect of his ‘the thought of preserver’ in the spring west wind could be pursued from the seeds above all of them. He mainly examined the cycle of the dead leaves which was the equivalents as a creative destruction in the related part with the autumn west wind. And he took the appreciation in the cycle of the seeds which was the equivalents as a creative preservation in that part of spring west wind.
Through the autumn west wind, the poet explicitly brought the thought of destroyer in the core of ‘renovation’ and ‘revolution’. It was a claim that he stood for defeating and destroying the old social system in order to create the new social system with a moving and cleansing power. The spirit and the thought was his ‘anarchic idealism’ from Godwin’s reformistic thought. In the spring west wind, he apparently adopted the quintessence of ‘birth’ and ‘rebirth’ as the thought of preserver, which was an aspiration that he sought for constructing and preserving the new social order or the new social system with the spiritual and moral force. Such spirit and thought was his ‘platonic idealism’ from Plato’s reformistic thought. In his Ode to the West Wind he transferred this notion to the real world to bring Plato into line with Godwin. And he made the transition not via the obviouslink— from Godwin’s utopia to Plato’s from Political Justice to The Republic—but via the simple Socratic dialogues.
On the correspondence or the correlation between the dead leaves, destruction, and death in the autumn and the seeds, creation, and rebirth in the spring, it is clear that Shelley contemplated the seasonal cycle and the life-cycle as a reciprocal connection in the west wind. The cycle of natural objects, which has gone and has come, was the same cycle of the season and life. And the life-cycle is to die and to bear, or to bear and to die. It is the relationship cycle between death and rebirth. This life-cycle is a kind of death in life and life in death. This rotation of death and life means the transmigration of Buddhism, which is the root of Buddhistic philosophy. In Ode to the West Wind, we could find out Shelley's ‘Buddhistic transmigration thought’ from some cycles except his idealistic reformation thought.