While walking one evening with his wife Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley heard a skylark’s singing above their heads. Years later, Mary recalled the incident: “In the spring (1819) we spent a week or two near Leghorn (Livorno, Italy) borrowing the house of some friends, who were absent on journey to England. It was a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fireflies, that we heard the caroling of the skylark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.” This, of course, is the poem Shelley published in 1820, “To a Skylark.”
To a Skylark
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. 5
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. 10
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightning,
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun. 15
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight, 20
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. 25
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. 30
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. 35
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: 40
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: 45
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: 50
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: 55
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass. 60
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. 65
Chorus Hymenæal,
Or triumphal chaunt,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want. 70
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? 75
With thy clear keen joyance
Langour cannot be:
Shadow of annoyance
Never came near thee:
Thou lovest; but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. 80
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? 85
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. 90
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. 95
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! 100
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. 105“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!” And so, Shelley inaugurates his celebration of the skylark. The skylark’s “profuse stains of unpremeditated art” fire Shelley’s imagination to find words that furnish what he feels. As he listens, he watches the bird, but the skylark ascends higher and higher until it becomes “Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun,” (15) which he hears but cannot see: “I hear thy shrill delight.” (20) Once the skylark is beyond his sight, Shelley plumbs his imagination for the means to translate the sublime effect of the bird’s song into words. His mind soars skyward, visualizing “a star of heaven, / In the broad day-light,” (18-19) “the arrows / Of that silver sphere,” (Venus) (21-22) and “when the moon rains out her beams.” (30) These comparisons seem not to satisfy Shelley: he ponders, “What thou art we know not;” and asks, “What is most like thee?” (31-32) He follows with four more comparisons (similes), to a poet, a maiden, a glow-worm, and to a rose, then crests his veneration of the skylark: “All that ever was / Joyous and clear and fresh, thy music doth surpass,” (60) but this is a veneration that continues to strive to fathom the skylark’s sublimity, but simply cannot.
After these attempts to depict the sublime nature of the skylark’s song, Shelley instead directly beseeches the skylark asking it to “Teach us spite, or bird, / What sweet thoughts are thine.” And two stanzas later (stanza 15) he pursues a deeper knowledge that inspires the bird to sing his unsurpassable “music: “What objects… / What fields or waves or mountains? / What shapes of sky or plain? / What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?” In those last four words, Shelley begins to uncover the secret of the skylark’s infinite, unencumbered happiness, which he fully discovers in the next two stanzas (76-85):
With thy clear keen joyance Langour 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?
Present but untranslatable in the skylark’s song is profound knowledge human do not achieve, which frees the skylark from “Languor,” “annoyance,” “love’s sad satiety” and endows the bird with understanding of death “more true and deep / Than we mortals dream.” In the next stanza, Shelley shows how life foils and afflicts us:
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.
In the penultimate stanza, Shelley praises the skylark’s music one more time: “Better than all measures / Of delightful sound, / Better than all treasures / That in books are found.” Nothing surpasses the beauty and inspiring power of the music that descends to him from the heavens. In the final stanza, he ends the poem with an appeal to the skylark to teach him “half the gladness / That thy brain must know,” empowering him to command the world’s attention so in turn humanity might listen and be uplifted by strains of sublime, poetic art.