To a Skylark / Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley completed the poem "To a Skylark" in late June, 1820, and forwarded it to London to be included among the verse accompanying Prometheus Unbound.

It was inspired by an evening walk in the country near Livorno, Italy, with Mary Shelley, and describes the appearance and song of a skylark they come upon. The poem uses a unique five line stanza with a three beat line except for the fifth line, which doubles the number beats of the other lines, and it has a rhyme scheme that is consistently 'ababb.'

Synopsis
A skylark is addressed by the poet, who calls it a "blithe Spirit" rather than a bird, because its song emanates from Heaven. Out of its full heart pours "profuse strains of unpremeditated art". The skylark ascends higher and higher in the blue sky, "like a cloud of fire", singing as it ascends. In the "golden lightning" of the sun, it floats and runs, like "an unbodied joy". As the skylark flies higher and higher, the poet 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 poet stated 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 poet implores it to reveal to 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 poet inquires, 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 poet 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 poet 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". The laughter of mankind is "fraught" with "some pain". Their "sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought". But, the poet states, 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. Referring to the bird as a "scorner of the ground", he states 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 work consists of five-line stanzas, all twenty-one following the same pattern. The first four lines are in the meter of trochaic trimeter. The fifth is in iambic hexameter, also known as an Alexandrine. The rhyme scheme of each stanza is in the form ABABB.

Influence
The 1941 comic play Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward takes its title from the opening line:
 * "Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert".