Name: Keli Tsikata ID: 10319496 ENGL 384 The Romantic Movement in English Literature

18th April 2012

A close reading of Percy Bysshe Shelleys To a Skylark

Percy Bysshe Shelleys To a Skylark was finished in late June 1820 at which time the poet was twenty-seven years-old. The poem is an ode extolling the splendour of the song and spirit of the eponymous bird to which the poem is dedicated. Per his wife Mary Shelleys account, the inspiration for the poem came from a walk in the countryside in Livorno, Italy where Mary and Percy Shelley had chosen to go so he could recover his health. Like much of the work characteristic of the Romantic poets, To a Skylark celebrates nature, its beauty and otherworldliness in this instance using the vehicle of a songbird, the skylark. The poem suggests through the use of vivid and exquisite imagery that the bird is more than its physical form. The speaker employed in the poem suggests that the birds song encapsulates a much larger spirit, which sustains it and gives it voice lending it a mystique unavailable to the human form which in contrast is prone to burdens imposed on it by weighty thoughts and fears, profound sadness and an overwhelming awareness of mortal limits.

The speaker begins by addressing the skylark in a manner which is unabashedly reverent, even as he simultaneously downplays the reality of its physical presence

saying Hail to thee blithe spirit/bird thou never wert. He suggests with these two lines that the Skylark is the embodiment of a spiritual presence which cannot be dismissed merely as a bird. In so doing he introduces the paradox which is embedded throughout the poem between this being at once a creature of flesh and blood and it being a spiritual being. The interplay of these two seeming irreconcilable concepts is embedded in much of the poem and is a major source of tension within it. This in turn lends the skylark a larger than life place in the world which it inhabits in this piece. It emerges [f]rom the earth...like a cloud of fire, creating a bridge between the mythical allusion to the phoenix and his notion of this birds spirit and the notion of it being insubstantial and ever rising as do clouds in the natural world. The manner in which it float[s] and run[s] like an unbodied joy is a metaphor that presumes that the birds song emanates from a place of pure happiness. The skylark is constantly interacting with the world around it which only serves to enrich its song, while its presence in the world seems to feed into the surroundings. He shows this by his description of how pale purple even/melts around [its] flight. The idea of its ability to melt further emphasizes its harmony with the environment around it while simultaneously re-emphasizing its vitality and unfettered nature. He extends his envy of its state both in reality its ability to fly - and the value he confers on it - its elevated position as a spiritual being to suggest a little unrealistically, that it enjoys a privileged place removed from the troubles of a worldly existence.

His comparison of the bird to a poet coupled with the feelings of joy which inspire song versus the more human attitudes of languor and the shadow of annoyance all serve

to heighten the clear differences the poet seeks to draw between the plight of the human poet and the unencumbered happiness of the skylark. Shelleys speaker appears to envy the skylarks proximity to heaven especially because of its musical gift, its closeness to an unnamed source and its infinite ability to move a much larger audience than the poet is able by virtue of its freedom and mobility but also as its song is untainted by negative emotion. He also tries to show how insufficient the songs and words of poets and musicians are by claiming to ...have never heard/Praise of love or wine/that panted forth a flood of rapture so divine. The skylarks song is takes on a celestial quality in the mind of the speaker. We seek 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. seeks to highlight the altogether unhappy state of mortal men beside the inextinguishable spirit of the skylark.

Vivid descriptions of natural scenery such as the golden lightning/of the sunken sun/oer which clouds are brightening, the pale purple even[ing], a star of heaven/in the broad daylight, and various other images push us towards an awareness of the eternal majesty of the both the bird itself as well as of the natural world around it at varying stages - of day, of night with echoes of the present and the future implied by these changes in time - absent the interference of man. In lines 91 105, he suggests that humans have a lot to learn from this creature both for its capacity for joy in song as well as for the fact that human beings somehow seem cut off from the ability to find even half the happiness with which the skylarks song is imbued. In essence, the skylark

becomes the ultimate metaphor for divine perfection as diametrically opposed to human frailty and failure.

List of Sources 1. Quiller-Couch, Arthur Thomas, Sir. The Oxford Book of English Verse. Oxford: Clarendon, 1919, [c1901]; Bartleby.com, 1999. <www.bartleby.com/101/>. Web. 16th April 2012. 2. Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_a_Skylark . Web. 16 April 2012.