Wild West Wind blows through Saucon Valley
Echinacea in Hellertown, November 2025
I was debating with someone I love a few days ago: Is Shelley’s “Ode To The West Wind” an inspiring, life-affirming poem, or a much sadder work about longing?
She thinks—and this is an admittedly gross oversimplification of her take—it’s very downbeat.
I feel it’s more uplifting, and even political. It’s celebrating change.
I know. A bit peak nerd to be in such a debate, but that’s my world.
Like anyone else in Hellertown and Lower Saucon, I’ve been this last week feeling the west wind churn through our neighborhoods, scattering bright leaves every which way, howling down chimneys. Don’t you love all that? I feels so good somehow. I don’t understand why, exactly. It seems to reflect some deep need for depth in the soul.
When I was small-town teenager, listening to Tears For Fears and Rush, “Ode To The West Wind” was one of the first poems I read on my own. A high school English teacher (of course) had clued me into Romantic poetry, but then I dove in on my own and “discovered” Shelley.
I loved all the stories of windswept moors and old churchyards and dolorous heartbreak. It jived with my own feeling of being anxious and lost at age 15. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley’s wife, Mary of “Frankenstein” fame—it’s the original YA lit, if you ask me.
Today, as I see it, maybe there’s hope in all the withering and stirring up of stuff.
As Shelley puts it, his words themselves, written in 1819, in Italy …
Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
Roses in my backyard
Around Hellertown and Lower Saucon, the landscapes right now look as if they were painted in orange and yellow and rosewood oils. Even around the yard, the fading rose bushes and dying echinacea possess a unique beauty spring and summer can’t match, at least not in the same way.
Of course, when I get the leaf blower out, I’m done thinking of poetry. That’s just pure Suburban Dad fun. I want to read that poem, too. But for now, in the quiet hum of the wind driving in from the southwest, I feel a sense of peace and anticipation.
Happily, if you have children in our schools, there are some excellent volumes of Romantic poetry at Saucon High’s library, including works by Shelley and his now somehow more famous wife, Mary. Hellertown Area Library is a bit short on Romantic Era poetry, at least in my latest catalogue search, but that’s probably because, sadly, no one asks for it.