Summary
The speaker, addressing a skylark, says that it is a “blithe
Spirit” rather than a bird, for its song comes from Heaven, and
from its full heart pours “profuse strains of unpremeditated art.”
The skylark flies higher and higher, “like a cloud of fire” in the
blue sky, singing as it flies. In the “golden lightning” of the
sun, it floats and runs, like “an unbodied joy.” As the skylark
flies higher and higher, the speaker loses sight of it, but is still
able to hear its “shrill delight,” which comes down as keenly as
moonbeams in the “white dawn,” which can be felt even when they
are not seen. The earth and air ring with the skylark’s voice, just
as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out from
behind “a lonely cloud.”
The speaker says that no one knows what the skylark is,
for it is unique: even “rainbow clouds” do not rain as brightly
as the shower of melody that pours from the skylark. The bird is
“like a poet hidden / In the light of thought,” able to make the
world experience “sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”
It is like a lonely maiden in a palace tower, who uses her song
to soothe her lovelorn soul. It is like a golden glow-worm, scattering
light among the flowers and grass in which it is hidden. It is like
a rose embowered in its own green leaves, whose scent is blown by
the wind until the bees are faint with “too much sweet.” The skylark’s
song surpasses “all that ever was, / Joyous and clear and fresh,”
whether the rain falling on the “twinkling grass” or the flowers
the rain awakens.
Calling the skylark “Sprite or Bird,” the speaker asks
it to tell him its “sweet thoughts,” for he has never heard anyone
or anything call up “a flood of rapture so divine.” Compared to
the skylark’s, any music would seem lacking. What objects, the speaker
asks, are “the fountains of thy happy strain?” Is it fields, waves, mountains,
the sky, the plain, or “love of thine own kind” or “ignorance or
pain”? Pain and languor, the speaker says, “never came near” the
skylark: it loves, but has never known “love’s sad satiety.” Of
death, the skylark must know “things more true and deep” than mortals
could dream; otherwise, the speaker asks, “how could thy notes flow
in such a crystal stream?”
For mortals, the experience of happiness is bound inextricably
with the experience of sadness: dwelling upon memories and hopes
for the future, mortal men “pine for what is not”; their laughter
is “fraught” with “some pain”; their “sweetest songs are those that
tell of saddest thought.” But, the speaker says, even if men could
“scorn / Hate and pride and fear,” and were born without the capacity
to weep, he still does not know how they could ever approximate
the joy expressed by the skylark. Calling the bird a “scorner of
the ground,” he says that its music is better than all music and
all poetry. He asks the bird to teach him “half the gladness / That
thy brain must know,” for then he would overflow with “harmonious
madness,” and his song would be so beautiful that the world would
listen to him, even as he is now listening to the skylark.
Form
The eccentric, songlike, five-line stanzas of “To a Skylark”—all
twenty-one of them—follow the same pattern: the first four lines
are metered in trochaic trimeter, the fifth in iambic hexameter
(a line which can also be called an Alexandrine). The rhyme scheme
of each stanza is extremely simple: ABABB.
Commentary
If the West Wind was Shelley’s first convincing attempt
to articulate an aesthetic philosophy through metaphors of nature,
the skylark is his greatest natural metaphor for pure poetic expression,
the “harmonious madness” of pure inspiration. The skylark’s song
issues from a state of purified existence, a Wordsworthian notion
of complete unity with Heaven through nature; its song is motivated
by the joy of that uncomplicated purity of being, and is unmixed
with any hint of melancholy or of the bittersweet, as human joy
so often is. The skylark’s unimpeded song rains down upon the world,
surpassing every other beauty, inspiring metaphor and making the
speaker believe that the bird is not a mortal bird at all, but a
“Spirit,” a “sprite,” a “poet hidden / In the light of thought.”
