Summary
The poem begins with a striking question, a speaker asking someone, “Who has seen the wind?” It is simple and straightforward, and may even seem like a trick question. Rossetti immediately offers an answer: this is no trick question; no one has ever seen the wind, her speaker asserts with line 2’s strange “neither I nor you” construction, which reverses the syntactically correct usage calling for the first person pronoun to come after a second- or third-person pronoun. The entire poem is delivered in short end-stopped lines, each a full clause. By line 3, Rossetti establishes a sing-song back and forth. Although no one has ever seen the wind, the speaker says, we can see its effects all around us, especially in the trees. The speaker then personifies the trees as trembling in the wind, and the reader is granted a sense of the sublime: the wind, it seems, inspires awe and terror as it passes by, even in trees.
The second stanza operates much like the first, mirroring the opening question as a refrain. “Who has the seen the wind?” Apparently, the answer remains the same, except this time it’s not “neither I nor you” but the grammatically correct “Neither you nor I,” a somewhat softer construction. Rossetti’ speaker is becoming less assertive, and this time, the trees are seen bowing “down their heads” as the wind passes by. The poem leaves its readers here to ponder the fleeting, yet sublime experience of something so commonplace as the wind.
Analysis
“Who has seen the wind” stands as a remarkable poem because of the way its two short stanzas paired with a simple rhyme scheme of ABCB allow for a fully realized philosophical pondering. For the child suggested by the nursery rhyme convention, “Who has seen the wind?” works didactically, exploring questions readers might have about unseen phenomena like the wind. Rossetti’s attention to the effects that the wind has on both trees and their leaves in stanzas one and two shows that, even though we cannot see the wind, its presence can be surmised indirectly.
For the adult, the stakes are more philosophical; looking past the sing-song ABCB rhyme scheme, Rossetti employs anthropomorphic imagery to offer a more human perception of trees facing the wind. Because they are rooted in the ground, trees are always experiencing the wind as it is “passing by,” and not able to shelter themselves. This causes Rossetti’s speaker to imagine that “the leaves hang trembling” in the awesome and sublime face of the invisible wind. The wind is terrifying, and what’s more, is ephemeral, evanescent: “the wind is passing through,” not staying, and that’s what makes it so profound. Any relief the wind might bring from warm weather or dry seasons remains as fleeting as the terror of a hurricane or the destruction of a tornado. The wind of Rossetti’s poem incites fascination, reflection, and serenity, yet still the trees must contain another side of the wind, full of terror and fury.
When the refrain returns in stanza two, Rossetti draws the reader’s attention away from the trees and back towards the speaker. This time though, her tone is less assertive, the “you nor I” construction of line 6 softening the forward didacticism. It seems that the speaker has become a bit more pensive. Playing with the double entendre of “bow,”—a word that means a religious/ceremonial motion as well as being a homonym for “bough,” meaning the largest branch of a tree—the poem begins grappling with issues of the divine. Are the personified trees bowing before the wind an allegory for human experience in the face of the divine? It seems likely that Rossetti, in fact, sees the wind as not just simple allegory, but an actual representation of God’s presence in the world. As mentioned above in the themes, wind has long been viewed as part and parcel of the divine. Rushing through the trees, incapable of being contained, sometimes gentle and sometimes destructive, the wind stands as one of the most enduring embodiments of the divine in the human imagination, especially for a Christian like Christina Rossetti, for whom wind would have been equated with God’s Holy Spirit. The holy spirit or wind is the source of faith and creation, in much the same vein as the sublime. Finally, then, the poem suggests that not only is the wind sublime; but the sublime itself is the God in nature. As the poem trails off, and the tone softens, it seems as if the speaker in fact has become like the tree, bowing down in the presence of the divine wind.
