AMID all the poetic riches of English literature, four short lines stand out. They are anonymous, as are almost all the songs, carols and ballads that fill the earliest pages of anthologies. But once read, they are not soon forgotten:

Westron wynde, when wilt thou blow, 
the small raine down can raine. 
Cryst, if my love were in my armes 
and I in my bedde again.

Almost everything about these lines is mysterious. The mystery begins with their power. They are not elegant; purists would say that the grammar fractures between the first line and the second, requiring a “so that” to link the “blow” and the “can”. As they stand, the wind and the small (that is, drizzling) rain are connected but disconnected, as if these are really two separate thoughts. But then the dreamy stream of consciousness suddenly resolves with a third idea: the weather may do what it likes, but what really matters is making love, and if only it could be now; right now.

And when is “now”? Another of the poem’s mysteries is the time and the season. Traditionally, the mild West Wind that brought soft rain was an indicator of spring; but the last two lines suggest a cosy hunkering down against something colder and more wintry. To some, the strong sense of waiting suggests that this is an Advent poem; yet that is to conflate Christ and love in a way that the words clearly do not intend.

It could in truth be set in any month of the year. In western Europe this is the prevailing wind, and brings almost any weather. Only intense heat, intense cold or drought are the exclusive preserve of winds from other quarters. Walkers who fear they are unprepared are always watching the west for those first intimations of bulking clouds and rain. But the warm breeze of a fine day can be western, too. That fickle character is a large part of the story.

A third mystery is place. To some readers, the dip and sway of the first line suggests a boat on the sea, and perhaps a sailor longing for home or a woman awaiting him. It was the West Wind which, in the “Odyssey”, began to blow Odysseus home. But sailors on an open ship, whose coarse canvas sails will only get heavier with a wetting, do not also long for rain, small or large. This seems more like a landsman’s longing, for rain to fall on fields and fertilise them. If so, it is a neat tie from the first couplet to the second, a metaphor of seed-sowing that gainsays the apparent artlessness of the poet. There is also an almost giddy fall from the wide heavens where the wind resides to one small, ordinary bed: from the diffusely vast, to the particular.

The earliest version of this little poem appears in a collection from about 1530. But it is clearly older, both in language and in style—probably Middle English. It seems plausible that “Westron Wynde” began as a folk lyric in the 14th century and simply lingered in the popular mind, well-loved enough to end up at the royal court as well as in the taverns. And thus it lived on.

The words could have survived by themselves, as sayings and nursery rhymes have done. But they also had a tune, to fix them more deeply. In fact, they had two. The first appears when the words do, in a partbook for lute; it is nothing special, and with its clutch of semibreves moves with a dirge-like tread. The second tune is both livelier and unashamedly beautiful (see below). It is also more evocative of wind, which sweeps around on “blow” for several bars before the rain comes in. Much the same thing happens in Monteverdi’s great madrigal “Zefiro torna” (“The West Wind returns”) of 1632, in which the tenor lines on the word mormorando, as Zefiro rustles among the leaves, goes on and on and over the page. In that piece too, wandering Zefiro merely sets the stage for the lover to feel even more alone.

The lovely English tune formed the basis for three masses of the 16th century, by John Taverner (who may have composed the tune himself), Christopher Tye and John Sheppard. The notion of a Western Wind mass is an alluring one, as if the closed and columned space of a chapel were suddenly to open out, through roof and windows, to the air; or as if the wind were to whistle its way in, giving the ponderous liturgy a lift. In the event, it does even more. The tune blows so repeatedly and hauntingly through all these works (36 times in Taverner’s) that the Latin counts for almost nothing. The sacred words do not remotely fit the profane theme. The music reverts irresistibly to the spine-tingling entry of the West Wind, as if this is all that matters.

Angel of rain and lightning

The device of writing masses round a popular song was then well worn in Europe; “L’homme armé”, from about 1450, inspired more than 40 of them. What was different about “Westron Wynde” was how exceedingly secular it was. “L’homme armé” exhorted everyone to put on chain mail and be afraid, very afraid, of an armed man (possibly St Michael) who was just about to appear. “Westron Wynde” was most obviously a daydream about sex. It is true that it evokes Christ; but not in prayer, only in the way that people still say “Christ!” in the godless 21st century. Indeed, if there is a god invoked in this lyric, sighed for and appealed to, it is the West Wind, which enters in the second tune on the same note as Christ. In the King James Bible of 1611 it is God who sends, dew-like, “small rain upon the tender herb”. Not here.

As gods in Greece, the four principal winds had been a mixed bunch; and none was more moody or harder to qualify than Zephyrus. According to Hesiod, they shared the same ancestors: all were the grandchildren of a Titan and the children of dawn and dusk, when winds tended to rise. Shaggy cloaked Boreas had just one aspect, which was cold. Icicles hung from his hair, and frost chapped his hands. Notos, the south wind, was known for rushing, shouting and storms. Zephyrus, “the brightener”, had a much more mixed personality. He also had more wives than his brothers, including the rainbow Iris. Marriage, though, did not stop him impregnating mares, according to Virgil in the “Georgics”: sometimes in the guise of a stallion, sometimes by merely blowing on them.

Zephyrus appears on the Tower of the Winds in Athens scattering flowers from his cloak; Homer called him “the lightest of all things”, softly riffling both robes and water, bringing the swallows. But in that tender aspect he tended to get knocked out of the way. In Homer’s “Odyssey”, the other winds had to be tied up in an ox-hide bag so that goody-goody Zephyrus could give Odysseus a gentle glide back to Ithaca; when the bag was accidentally opened, the other winds supplanted him. (In Vivaldi’s “Summer”, as he wanders round sighing to the songs of turtledoves and cuckoos, fortissimo Boreas again barges him aside.) In this guise he was so mild that he was hardly recognisable as the bringer of really nasty weather, though the Greeks did speak of his “shrill heels” and “wild blasts”. The disconnect in “Westron Wynde” between the West Wind blowing and the soft rain falling may have been deliberate, after all.

Percy Bysshe Shelley avoided this problem, in his “Ode to the West Wind”, by having two west winds. They were brother and sister—which always meant, to Shelley, complementary parts of a single being. The azure life-bringer of the spring, blowing “her clarion o’er the dreaming earth”, was merely the other side of the brutal force of autumn, filling the sky with “tumult of thy mighty harmonies”:

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky’s commotion, 
Loose clouds like earth’s decaying leaves are shed, 
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean, 

Angels of rain and lightning.....

“Destroyer and Preserver” was Shelley’s invocation to this dual personality. It carried echoes of prayers to the god Shiva, bringer of life and death; this West Wind had again become a god.

Shelley wrote his poem as he watched the West Wind roar through a wood on the banks of the Arno outside Florence. That wind had been a comrade and a model since his boyhood, both out on the hills and “over heaven” where he followed it, equally “tameless and swift and proud”. He urged it to take him over, to blow through him and broadcast his words as “the trumpet of a prophecy” to awaken the Earth politically, socially, sexually and spiritually. None of that could happen unless the old order was violently swept out first. In one of Shelley’s notebooks the connection is explicit: in the midst of some dreamy lines to Zephyr, “Awakener of the spirit’s ocean”, which are not quite working, he suddenly bursts into the first draft of his great political rallying-cry, “The Mask of Anarchy”:

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the sea
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

There was no doubt how that voice, Liberty’s, had reached him; and no doubt that, unless the wind howled and shouted first, spirit’s ocean would never wake. “Westron Wynde” observed the same progression: the wind blew, all else followed.

Even in his spring-bringing, though, the West Wind could be rough. In Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus”, painted around 1480, the wind is a swarthy he-man with the nymph Cloris (“Greenery”) draped nervously round his waist, her fingers apparently crossed. His puffing cheeks are not so much wafting flowers on Venus as pelting her hard, like rain, as he blows her to the shore. As in “Westron Wynde”, he makes love present and possible; but his sharp wings are scaled with dark feathers, like those of a bird of prey. In Botticelli’s earlier “Primavera” he is even more menacing, a cold blue March wind about to grab Cloris. It is not surprising that writers reached for diminutive “zephyrs”, harmless little breathlings from the same direction, to evoke the mildest winds of summer. The full-blown element is another thing entirely.

He was also sexually ambivalent. “Westron Wynde” offers no clues either to the love or the lover: the poem is assumed to be by a man, but nothing in it makes that certain. All lovers prey to helpless compulsion are blown as if by buffeting winds, and in any direction. The West Wind’s most notorious action in Greek mythology was to divert a discus thrown by Apollo so that it killed the Spartan boy-prince Hyacinthus, whom Zephyrus loved, but whom Apollo had won. From Hyacinthus’s blood flowers sprang. Zephyrus was saved from Apollo’s rage by Cupid, but only because he had acted in the name of love. The price of this swift intervention was that the West Wind should serve Love ever after.

Servant and master then became conflated. The commands of one often impelled the actions of the other, as when, in Apuleius’s “The Golden Ass”, Zephyrus carried the lovely virgin Psyche—“soul”—into Cupid’s palace. The West Wind was on his best behaviour here, wafting her to a meadow filled with flowers; in some 19th-century paintings, he is given butterfly wings like hers. He looks a lot like Love himself, as he does on several vases from ancient times. Their characters—by turns chilly and warm, mild and savage—are also much the same. No wonder “Westron Wynde” moves so seamlessly from one to the other.

In one respect, though, they are very different. Cupid enslaves with one scrape of his arrows. The West Wind, in all aspects, is a liberator. He fills the sails to set them in motion and softens the land for the grass to grow; he induces rather than compels love to appear. And he releases the dead or seemingly dead, stripping the leaves from the trees, conveying the dormant seeds to their graves in the earth, in order for new life to come. He accompanies Psyche through death to the realms of the immortal as he carries Shelley’s awakened spirit through turbulence to new-made worlds.

At first glance, this cosmic role seems too enormous for the simple Westron Wynde. But perhaps that explains the lasting appeal of those four lines: they sum up, and also transcend, human life.