To add to its destructive force, the wind is also addressed as dirge and sepulchre, which are associated with death.
In stanza 3 the mood changes completely: peace is restored and the violent energy of the preceding stanzas has ceased. Now the action of the wind is described in spring and on the sea, its function being a creative one. The sea, in fact, is seen as the place where in ancient times civilization was born. He visualizes how the wind disturbed the typical calm of the Mediterranean sea, personified as a languid form, "lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams", and reflecting "old palaces and towers", but reflecting them lazily, like a person asleep. The first part of stanza 3 is characterized by a softer atmosphere and sweet colours (the azure and crystalline sea) and by the presence of flowers. Moreover, soft consonants and falling cadences have replaced the earlier harsher consonants. Towards the end of the stanza, however, a gloomier mood re-emerges and the scene shifts from the Mediterranean sea to the Atlantic Ocean, described in powerful and frightening terms, whose level powers cleave themselves into chaos and whose vegetation in the depths of the sea shakes as with fear.
Stanza 4 describes the poet's identification with the wind and introduces a more personal tone. He draws together the dead leaves of the first stanza, the clouds of the second and the power that the waves have, so that he could combat the evils he wanted to destroy. He speaks about his childhood when he ran after the wind, thus contrasting his past energy with his present misery. He feels that he has lost his boyhood's freedom, when everything seemed possible to him, and that the passing of the time has tamed and enslaved him. There is an echo here of Wordsworthian thought, but with a difference of emphasis: Wordsworth felt that he had lost the visionary spirit of childhood; Shelley is concerned with the loss of his personal physical and spiritual energy.
