TO A SKYLARK

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

You are now about to read and to study what is generally considered to be the most perfect poem in the English language. This fact should arouse your curiosity and your desire to study it in order that you may know why this claim is made.

But first, we must know something about the wonderful song bird known as the skylark. Because of their marvelous songs, the skylark and the nightingale are the "birds of the poets." Poets have written about them in all ages.

The skylark is a small bird, not quite as large as a robin and more slender. It is found in most parts of Europe. It is found even in Southern Egypt, in China, and India, and in the islands around Europe and Asia. In English literature, it occupies the foremost place among birds.

The skylark is not a particularly pretty bird, but its song is beyond the power of language to describe. Yet despite this fact, the bird is not a rare bird; it is found in large numbers in the regions mentioned. It is a favorite cage-bird, and even when confined in a cage, it will sing its wonderful song for hours at a time. The skylark is not a "woods bird," but lives and rears its young in the open fields, making its nest usually in growing grainfields and rearing two or three broods each year.

But the wonderful thing about the skylark is its song. At the very first lightening of dawn, the bird starts up from the meadow where it has slept, and in ever widening circles, flies skyward, meanwhile pouring down a "flood of melody" that is too beautiful

to be described. Up and up, in larger circles, the bird flies, till it disappears entirely from sight. But all the while, although the bird cannot be seen, the flood of melodious song comes pouring down.

Now imagine the poet Shelley in Italy, at early dawn, listening to this marvelous song pouring down from the sky when the best eyes cannot see the bird as it sings. That is why he calls the bird "blithe spirit," for it is as if a spirit, and not a thing of flesh, is singing in the sky. A "blithe spirit" is a joyous spirit.

Stanza 1. Read it in silence. Read very slowly, or you will miss the wonderful meaning. Heaven in line 3 means the sky, and it also means the place of eternal joy, for the poet thinks the bird could not sing thus unless he were near heaven.

Note also the word "pourest" and its meaning.

Then the poet speaks of "profuse strains," or more than plentiful strains of music.

Now human singers have to think very hard in order to write their music. They have to meditate over it beforehand, or premeditate. The bird does not have to think at all, or to premeditate his art. It just comes to him. Now read again stanza 1 with the help of this explanation.

Stanza 2. The poet keeps looking up and listening. The bird flies higher and higher in widening circles, just as the smoke from a small fire on the ground rises in ever widening circles until it looks like an inverted cone.

The last two lines are easy to understand.

Different poets have called the skylark- "sky-climbing bird"; "wakener of morn"; "a sightless song"; and Shakespeare says,

"Hark! hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings."

Stanza 3. The "sunken sun "is the sun before it rises in the morning, not the setting sun of evening. But what is an "un

bodied joy"? Think of a "joy" as a person, yet a joy. While in the body, it could suffer from hunger and cold and fear. Now think of it as just having been released from its "body," or "unbodied," and just starting out on its free flight in air, unhampered by its body, and you have what the poet means.

Stanza 4. The pale purple before full dawn, as the sun comes higher, now melts around the bird's flight.

The last three lines explain themselves.

Stanza 5. The sun now comes up over the rim of the horizon. Its "intense lamp" grows smaller as it rises, and now we cannot see it, because it is so bright, but "we feel that it is there." The same with the skylark. Study this stanza.

Stanza 6. This stanza is easy to understand, but you must try to hear and to see what it describes.

Now the poet, after describing the flight and song of the bird, is puzzled to know what the bird's flight and song are like. The following outline will show what he thinks the bird is like.

Stanza 8.

The bird is like an unseen poet.

Stanza 9. The bird is like a highborn maiden high up in a palace tower, singing a love song, which overflows her bower and pours down over the walls of her tower as the bird's song pours down from the sky. Stanza 10.

only is seen.

The bird is like a hidden glowworm whose light

Stanza 11. - The bird is like a rose hidden in its own green leaves, yet sending out its fragrance, till it makes the bees faint with too much sweet, just as this bird pours out the wonderful melody of its song, until the poet is overcome.

Stanza 12.

-Now the comparisons came to the poet too rapidly to give a stanza to each, and so in this stanza they come thick and fast, ending in this:

"All that ever was

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

Read stanzas 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 for these comparisons. Stanza 13. Now the poet, as he hears the marvelous song, sung without effort, feels how poor and weak poets are in comparison, and he begs the bird to teach them its thoughts, for he has never heard such music from poets.

Nor (stanza 14) can a wedding march, or "chorus Hymeneal," equal it. Nor a chant of triumph for a conqueror. Either of these when compared with the bird's song would be —

"... an empty vaunt,

A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want."

Stanza 15.

bird to sing thus. Stanza 16.

The poet wants to know what has inspired the
Read this stanza.

Shelley had had great griefs, and was tired of life. He had been unhappy in love. Read this stanza for the comparison between the bird and himself. "Satiety" (sa-ti'ê-ti) means a state of having grown tired of something.

Stanza 17. - He thinks the bird must know more of death and the after-life than men, or "mortals," know. He tells why in the last line.

Stanzas 18 and 19. These explain themselves. Keep in mind that in this poem the poet is talking to the skylark. In these two stanzas he tells the bird that we have memory which enables us to see through closed eyes and review the past; that we have imagination which helps us to peer into the future ; that we long for what has been and fear what may come, for, he

says,

"We look before and after,

And pine for what is not."

He tells the bird that there is pain even in our most hearty laughter and that

"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

He then goes on to tell the bird that even if we were born without pride or fears or tears, and were as free from care as a