# Nov. 21

This year, 2022, marks the bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death. Over all these two hundred years, there are countless fine lines of poetry written by Shelley that have continously inspired people to rekindle the fire of hope in their hearts. But of them all, a particular line from *Ode to the West Wind* may be the most significant one, which is “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”. This single line of verse is, of course, far more than a rhetorical question concerning the change of seasons, for it is indeed, as the poet states, a divine prophecy given to those people trapped in states of despair and desolation.

*Ode to the West Wind* consists of five cantos written in terza rima, which is invented by Dante Alighieri and first used in his grand epic poem *La Divina Commedia*. Apart from the inherited rhyming scheme, there might be another deeper layer of connection between *The Divine Comedy* and this poem written by Shelley. Winter, like Dante’s Inferno, symbolizes death, while spring, the epitome of Dante’s Paradiso, symbolizes rebirth. Just like withered leaves blasted by the wild west wind are scattered all over the place to quicken a potential new burst of vitality in the upcoming spring, all those terrible sufferings Dante witnesses in Hell also lead him to a more comprehensive understanding of Life, Light and Love, granting him the vision which enables the once lost Florentine to climb up mount Purgatory and eventually reach the gate of Paradise. Both of these masterpieces produced in Italy implies a universal truth, that descent is also ascent and death actually heralds rebirth.

Shelley embraced his own death two hundred years ago, drowned sailing in a tempest, but just as the words engraved on his tombstone, which is from Shakespeare’s *Tempest* has shown to the world, “Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange”, there indeed, have risen a thousand beacons from the spark he bores.

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