Being ‘Thou’: (Re)Thinking the Poet as Ecoshaman

Abstract

A shaman is believed to be the one who is capable of performing spiritual journey to the other worlds, staying in trance state and attaining altered state of consciousness. He/she is a healer, protector or prognosticator. A shaman is also a mediator or a connecting figure between the members of a village/tribe and the world of spirits, always advocating on behalf of the community against all ills. The task of an ecoshaman thus becomes an endeavour to help us develop both a psychic and physical relationship of reciprocity with the land and the beings that provide us with life. Romantic poets’ works have enormously been studied in terms of the trajectories of various theoretical and conceptual frameworks. Written in 1819, Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind has been the subject of elaborate literary and academic deliberations. Industrial Revolution with all its concomitant ills on nature is oft quoted as the major impetus for Shelley’s poetic imagination of ‘the Wind’ as a trope for defending nature. The paper attempts at re-imagining the poet as an ecoshaman, who in his most spiritual sense envisions the innate source of energy or the ultimate reality within him. In contrast to the earlier literature that situates the poet as an activist, the paper proposes the poet to be a spiritual healer, a shaman who strives to make the readers realise the inter-connectedness and web of relations immanent within the whole universe.