Who Has Seen the Wind? Literary Elements

The speaker is the first-person, singular lyrical speaker asking the question "Who has seen the wind?" All of the poem's narration comes from speaker musing about answers to her own question. There is also a "you" present, but this "you" is kept separate from the speaker.

The poem is in the form of a nursery rhyme. There are two stanzas of four lines, with a rhyme scheme of ABCB. The first two lines of each stanza are written in iambic trimeter, the subsequent lines in iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.

The poem's main question, regarding the unseen nature of the wind, can be read as a metaphor for all of those phenomena that are witnessed only indirectly. In this way, the wind acts as a metaphor any concept that we must accept on faith.

Nursery rhyme

The setting could be real or imaginary; either way, the speaker describes a setting outdoors, where the wind is blowing and the trees can be seen.

Didactic

There are two options. The speaker and her companion are the protagonists to the elusive and antagonistic wind, or the trees are the protagonists to a terrifying and powerful antagonistic wind.

The poem takes as its conflict the question of knowing and believing in the existence of unseen phenomena.

The climax of the poem occurs in realizing the presence of the wind through the trembling of the leaves and the bowing of the trees.

The leaves in line 3 stand in as a metonymy for both the trees themselves and anything experiencing the wind, including the speaker at that moment.

In line 3 the leaves are personified as "trembling," an action that is done out of fear and attributed to an animate being. Elsewhere, in line 7, the trees are personified as they are said to be "bowing down their heads," which is a conscious act of deference to another.

Both of these are instances of anthropomorphism.