The Ode

Winter at our backyard, No. 10 Georgenstraβe, Berlin

While in high school, I listened to my English teacher read “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. As she read it before the class, I could almost hear the swish-swash of the trees as their branches yielded to the fierce onslaughts of the west wind. I would close my eyes and imagine the trees bending and swaying to the violent force unleashed upon them. There was nothing they could do but yield. Then she would pause, make eye contact with her enthralled students and read on to the poet’s prayer:


     Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
     I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

    A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
    One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.

I fell in love with the power of Shelley’s words, his imagery that allowed me to picture an experience I had never really had. I was awed. But as a carefree young girl I couldn’t identify with the agony that Shelley expressed imploring that he be carried away by the west wind.

Two years ago my husband and I experienced the tail end of the worst winter Berlin, Germany has had in 30 years. I did not particularly enjoy walking on snow-covered streets nor maneuvering our way on treacherous icy sidewalks. (Oh, yes, I did slip once and it had to be right in front of a bus waiting station before a whole crowd of people!) I could not wait for winter to go away. On the few days when we could walk to a Berlin park, we would see groves of naked trees. A dreary sight. I would describe how dead the trees were.

My husband, he who seems to always have the better perspective in our family, would say,” They are not dead. They will come back in a couple of months.” I knew he was right, but it did not stop me from complaining and fervently wishing that winter would soon go and take away the freezing cold, the snow, the icy sidewalks and the frozen, muddied puddles that I sometimes fell into. It was difficult to be cheerful in the midst of the dark, drab, freezing days. It is so hard to think of the return of life in the midst of such deathlike scene. But winter had to come for in the Creator’s scheme of things, it, too, had a purpose. But to stand in the midst of it all and wait for the better day requires faith and trust that indeed, when it has done its appointed task, winter will go and usher us into the beautiful renewal of life. Percy Bysshe Shelley concludes:           

     If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?



             

 Spring at our backyard at No. 10 Georgenstraβe, Berlin