To A Skylark Analysis

Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!

Bird thou never wert,

That from Heaven, or near it,

Pourest thy full heart

In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.



Higher still and higher

From the earth thou springest

Like a cloud of fire;

The blue deep thou wingest,

And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.



In the golden lightning

Of the sunken sun

O'er which clouds are bright'ning,

Thou dost float and run,

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.



The pale purple even

Melts around thy flight;

Like a star of Heaven

In the broad daylight

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight:



Keen as are the arrows

Of that silver sphere,

Whose intense lamp narrows

In the white dawn clear

Until we hardly see--we feel that it is there.



All the earth and air

With thy voice is loud.

As, when night is bare,

From one lonely cloud

The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.



What thou art we know not;

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not

Drops so bright to see

As from thy presence showers a rain of melody.



Like a poet hidden

In the light of thought,

Singing hymns unbidden,

Till the world is wrought

To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:



Like a high-born maiden

In a palace tower,

Soothing her love-laden

Soul in secret hour

With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower:



Like a glow-worm golden

In a dell of dew,

Scattering unbeholden

Its aerial hue

Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view:



Like a rose embowered

In its own green leaves,

By warm winds deflowered,

Till the scent it gives

Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-winged thieves.



Sound of vernal showers

On the twinkling grass,

Rain-awakened flowers,

All that ever was

Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.



Teach us, sprite or bird,

What sweet thoughts are thine:

I have never heard

Praise of love or wine

That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.



Chorus hymeneal

Or triumphal chaunt

Matched with thine, would be all

But an empty vaunt--

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.



What objects are the fountains

Of thy happy strain?

What fields, or waves, or mountains?

What shapes of sky or plain?

What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?



With thy clear keen joyance

Languor cannot be:

Shadow of annoyance

Never came near thee:

Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety.



Waking or asleep,

Thou of death must deem

Things more true and deep

Than we mortals dream,

Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?



We look before and after,

And pine for what is not:

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught;

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.



Yet if we could scorn

Hate, and pride, and fear;

If we were things born

Not to shed a tear,

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.



Better than all measures

Of delightful sound,

Better than all treasures

That in books are found,

Thy skill to poet were, thou scorner of the ground!



Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now!

.: :.

Shelley's poetry revealed two types of idealism. While in his poem 'Ode to the West Wind' he gave vent to his revolutionary idealism, in 'To a Skylark' he dealt with Platonic idealism. The abstract and the invisible are more real than the concrete and the visible. Shelley's bird is not a bird of flesh and blood. It is more a spirit. Shelley made it a scorner of the ground. While Wordsworth made its skylark 'true to the kindred points of heaven and home', Shelley made his skylark a denizen of the sky where it got lost for ever.
Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee from Kolkata, India

| Posted on 2009-09-30 | by a guest

.: :.

Shelley's poetry revealed two types of idealism. While in his poem 'Ode to the West Wind' he gave vent to his revolutionary idealism, in 'To a Skylark' he dealt with Platonic idealism. The abstract and the invisible are more real than the concrete and the visible. Shelley's bird is not a bird of flesh and blood. It is more a spirit. Shelley made it a scorner of the ground. While Wordsworth made its skylark 'true to the kindred points of heaven and home', Shelley made his skylark a denizen of the sky where it got lost for ever.

| Posted on 2009-09-30 | by a guest

.: :.

To a Skylark is a romantic poem about nature and all of its beauty. It is a tribute to the bird and nature how easily and freely the birds sing. The poet is almost pining for the ability to express himself through poetry as easily as the birds do through song.

| Posted on 2009-03-11 | by a guest

.: :.

This poem actually has very little to do with Shelley's "Romanticism". This is actually a kind of Shamanic Poetry, writen as a sort of spell. The Skylark is really a sort of spirt, or muse, bringing great song and pure joy to the world, from the heavens. The speaker sees and hears this "bird", and wonders of it's power; however, in order to obtain this spirits power, he must understand it first. The only issue with understanding this spirit is, it is so great, there is no word in any language that can describe it. He must compare it to other beings; the poet lost in beautiful though, the love stricken maiden singing from inside her dwelling, the glow worm hidden from view; all of these situations are truely beautiful, but only a small portion of them can be seen and understood. The rest of this poem is the finishing of the shamanic spell. The speaker is still unsure what this spirit is, but he understands that the joy and love it brings to those around it could never be understood by any living man on earth. Eventually, out of despiration, the speaker almost beggs the spirit to teach him half of this harmonious wisdom, for if he could put this song into a poem, the world will stop to listen.

| Posted on 2009-02-25 | by a guest

.: Comment. :.

This poem has to do with Percy Bysche Shelley being a Romantic, and admiring nature in alot of ways: skylark, glow-worm, rose.
He expresses his love and passion for art as well: "like a poet hidden in the light of thought", but seems to compare man-made art with the skylark's 'unpremeditated art'.
The poem is a song, which could mean that the poet is attempting to imitate the skylark's talent and skill. He did not set a steady rhyme scheme which could highlight the imperfection of poetry in comparision to the Skylark's song.

| Posted on 2008-02-11 | by a guest