Click on the word where the turn occurs, or, if the turn occurs between words, on the word immediately after the turn. For more detailed instructions, go to Instructions
by Anonymous
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Western wind when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Western Wind by Anonymous
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Western Wind by Anonymous
Correct! Congratulations! Now, please identify the kind of turn at work in this poem
Western Wind by Anonymous
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Referred to by Jerry Harp as “a primal cry of English literary tradition,” the anonymous “Western Wind” contains a momentous tonal shift in its four lines, hinging on the third line’s opening exclamation of “Christ.” Following an initial plea to the personified elemental powers of wind and rain, this strange shout, “the ambiguity of the opening cry of ‘Christ,’” grants the poem’s latter half a great deal of distinct “tonal complexity”; as Harp writes, “[‘Christ’] functions as both angry expletive and prayerful invocation.” Further intricacy is derived from the narrator’s apparent desire to be in bed with his beloved, implying, naturally, “closeness of a more carnal kind,” but also, as Harp explains, a broader emotional longing: “…I take it that what he longs for is an intimacy, a feeling of belonging, that integrates every part of his experience, from the greatest heights of spiritual harmony to the greatest depths of physical union.” Although this poem lacks the total “shift in genre” wrought by some mid-course turns, its drastic change in tone—this “dramatic shift in the poem’s implied world”—nonetheless makes “Western Wind” a prime example of what Harp describes as the particularly “radical” nature of mid-course turns.