Ode To A Skylark

In Livorno in June of 1820, according to Mary Shelley, on a beautiful evening,

she and Shelley heard the carolling of a lark, and that inspired the poet to
compose the poem. The attempt turns out to be one in imitation of the birds
skill. In his Defence of Poetry, he wrote, A poet is a nightingale, who sits in
darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors
are men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician... but the bird here
is skylark, not nightingale. What the birds share, of course, is their invisibility,
their reduction to pure bodiless voice. Therefore we are to take the part as a
symbolic representation of bodiless audible beauty that strives, like the one
in Platos Phaedrus, up towards perfection. What matters for the poet is not
any particular bird or thing, but is the idea of beauty. The skylark can sustain
a loud, merry musical note at great height while flying, and only while flying,
and they sometimes fly so high that can only be heard and not seen. All
these natural facts were sufficient to inspire Shelley to start the poem by
calling the bird a spirit, Hail to thee, Blithe spirit. That Shelley calls the
birds art Profuse strains of unpremeditated art often gives a clue to the
critics to call Shelleys poem itself an exercise of unpremeditated art. The
next stanza provides the movement and activity of the bird, and this in turn
becomes applicable to the whole poem:

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.

As Shelley saw the bird singing in evening time he ignored the literary fact
that larks are morning birds, which Shakespeare relied upon for his famous
debate between Romeo and Juliet over whether the bird they have heard is
the nightingale or the lark. For, above all, Shelley is concerned here with an
unbodied joy whose race has just begun. The point of reference takes the
safe propagandas between the visible and the invisible which may have the
philosophical dimension of the dialectics of the material and the spiritual:

Like a star of heaven

In the broad day-light.

It even elicits the sense of existence in bodiless beauty, beauty, as the

idealist philosophers would believe, is essentially bodiless. As a poet Shelley
enjoys the larks outpourings as it can give him aesthetic pleasure.

In the eighth stanza Shelley likens the bird to a poet hidden/In the light of
thought, and here we come to understand something of his intention. But
the bird is not hidden in the light of thought. It is surrounded by its own
happy outpourings. In the subsequent four stanzas, the birds song is likened
to a high-born maidens song, to s glow worms aerial hue, to a roses
fragrance, to the sound of vernal shower and the different types of simile
establish the one fact that All that ever was/Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy
music doth surpass.

Now the birds perfection of arts is seen in contrast to the imperfection of

human life and arts as well. Here the bird comes nearer the one Platos
Phaedrus, which is an example of how and why human beings should try to
achieve the ideal. In an agonising gesture Shelley questions the bird what
philosophy of life enables it to live in the realm of perfection. The archetype
of fountain as a symbol of poetic inspiration comes in Shelleys mind along
with the beautiful forms of nature, fields, waves, mountains and so on. In
the next stanza the larks joyfulness is seen in contrast to the inevitable
short life of the highest human emotion, love:

Thou lovest but neer knew loves sad satiety.

So in Shelley art and life become inter-related and this is evident in the
questionWhat ignorance of pain. The poet has confronted with the
paradoxes of life:

We look before and after,

And pine for what is not.

Shakespeare in Hamlet makes his Prince utter similar words:

Sure he that made us with such large discourse

Looking before and after gave us not

That capability and Godlike reason.

The crux of the matter is that like a great poet Shelley has also come to
understand the great divide in the human psyche,

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

The reason he traces is human adherence to the ground or the material

world opposed to the spiritual world as Plato taught. The lark can achieve
perfection because it is scorner of the ground. This is where we come to

the difference of attitude of the two Romantic poets, Shelley and

Wordsworth. Shelleys skylark is an inhabitant of purely ethereal arena and is
a symbol of perfection. On the other hand, Wordsworths skylark in his poem
To a Skylark is an inhabitant of both earth and ether:

Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!

In the last stanza Shelley has stated his intention clearly. He longs to follow
or imitate the eudemonic being and learn the harmonious madness. This
Platonic concept of divine frenzy clearly indicates Shelleys desire for artistic
creation which will be perfect products, and he perhaps thinks that this is
possible only in art or imagination, not in real life. To conclude, it is perhaps
natural for the great souls to feel what Goethes Faust tells his student:

It is inborn in each of us

That our feelings thrust upward and forward

While over us, lost in blue space

The lark sings its thrilling songs.

Towards the end of the poem the skylark is transfigured into a sort of poetic
inspiration for the poet as he desperately craves for the possession of the
artistic qualities essential for the creation of his own poetry.

*Why does the poet address the skylark, a bird as a spirit/a blithe spirit?

Ans: In the poem To a Skylark Shelley is listening to the song of a bird,

which is itself invisible. It seems to the poet that the bird, while singing,
soaring high above the ground, has lost its physical existence and has
become a spirit. Shelley is here trying to represent the bird as an abstract
quality of pure joy, a quality so poignantly missing in the humans.

2. Explain the expression profuse strains of unpremeditated art .

Ans: In the poem To a Skylark the birds are unpremeditated, that is,
natural or spontaneous in the sense that those are not preconceived or preplanned, unlike the human art, generally, or more specifically, the poets art,
which is preconceived. Shelley is here trying to represent the bird as an
abstract quality of pure joy, a quality so poignantly missing in the humans.

3. *Explain the simile Like a cloud of fire.

Or, Why does Shelley introduce the image of fire in the poem?

Ans: In the poem To a Skylark the bird in its venture up in the sky is
compared to a cloud lit up by the rays of the setting sun at twilight. Thus
Shelley links the bird to the image of fire in order to emphasise the birds
abstract existence as a quality having the power to purify the human mind.

4. ***Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begunExplain.

Ans: In the poem To a Skylark Shelley seeks to convey the idea that in its
flight for singing, the bird, as if, has found a new life, a life of abstract delight
which is possible only by transcending the body and becoming a spirit.

5. **Keen as the arrows...we feel that it is there. Explain the lines.

AnsAns: The skylark is imagined here to be venturing up in the sky at dawn

when Venus, the morning star shines brightly before its disappearance. The
comparison, implicit here, is that the bird is seen momentarily before its swift
arrow-like disappearance in the sky. However, its presence can be felt from
its song.

6. 6. **When the night is bare...heaven is overflowdExplain the situation

imagined by the poet.

Ans: In the poem To a Skylark the birds pouring out of numbers is

compared to a full moons shining from above on the ground. Its song has
moved the poet so immensely that it seems to him that it has filled the air
under the earth with its melodies.

7. ***Like a poet hidden/In the light of thought.Explain the simile used by

the poet.

Or, Why does the poet compare the bird to a poet?

Ans: In a poem the presence of the poet can be felt in the radiance of the
thoughts and ideas s/he intends to convey to the reader. As a poet remains
physically absent yet spiritually present in a poem, the skylark remains
hidden in the sky while singing.

8. ***Till the world is wrought...it heeded not.

What does poet mean by hopes and fears?

Or, What is Shelleys view of the worlds reaction to the birds song?

Ans: In these lines from the poem To a Skylark Shelley speaks of the
idealistic projects of the bird. Like a poet the bird, it seems to the poet, is
concerned with those activities, which worldly men cannot aspire to do. But
they are led to sympathise with the bird for such idealistic activities with the
mixed emotions of hopes and fears.

9. **Like a high-born maiden...in secret hourBring out the justification of

the simile.

Ans: Shelley here stretches out his imagination further to compare the
skylark to a maiden confined in her secret chamber. Just as an aristocratic
maiden sings in her secret chamber at midnight to soothe her love-sick mind
from high above the ground, the bird, it seems to the poet, is similarly
pouring out music.

10. **Teach us, spirit or bird...a flood of rapture so divineWhy does the
poet say so?

Ans: The poet is very much pained to find his own world filled with sorrows
and anxieties whereas the skylark remains untouched and unaffected by all
these things. To him the bird is a bodiless embodiment of joy, and that is why
he seeks inspiration of sweet thoughts in its song.

11. ***Chorus hymeneal ...But an empty vauntExplain.

Ans: Shelley thinks that, compared to the skylarks song the marriage songs
or songs of victory would be nothing but empty hollow boasting; for, he feels
that in those songs joy cannot be fully expressed.

12. ***What objects are the fountains...What ignorance painExplain.

Ans: The poet is here desperate to find out the inspiration of those things
which remain behind the Skylarks production of pure joy. This becomes
necessary for Shelley since he finds his own world, the human world with
pain, sorrow and anxiety that do not allow him to sing in pure joy.

13. ***Waking or asleep...we mortals dreamWhy does Shelley refer to

death here in the context of the skylarks song?

Ans: What Shelley wants to convey here is that human understanding and
experience of joy always remain affected or limited by an unseen
overhanging presence of death. On the contrary, the skylark, Shelley
presupposes, must have remained unconscious of or oblivious to death.
Otherwise, it would not have been possible for it to sing so purely.

14. ***We look before and after...Our sweetest songs are those that tell of
saddest thoughtsExplain.

Ans: What Shelley wants to convey here is that, because of the dominance of
sorrows in lifearising out of our mundane attachment to thingsthe songs,
which refer to our sorrows, appeal to us most. This view is, however,
psychologically justified as we find echoes of our own sorrows experienced in
real life in sad songs. This happens, Shelley tells us, because we go by
mundane calculations. [We find here some of the Shakespearean echoes
from Macbeth.]

15. **If we were things born...Not to shed a tear

What does Shelley want to mean by the unfulfilled wishes?

Ans: Shelley acknowledges that there are human limitations to experiencing

pure as opposed to the skylark. That is why the poet laments that, had
human beings been born without those limitations, it would have been
possible for them to reach the realm of perfection the bird lives in.

16. ***...the scorner of the groundWhy is the skylark called so?

Ans: The skylark sings soaring high above the ground. The ground here
symbolically stands for the harsh mundane realities, which affect human
appreciation and experience of joy and beauty greatly. The bird can sing so
perfectly, the poet thinks, because it hates the mundane world and flies high
above it.

17. **Teach me half the gladness...as I am listening nowExplain.

Ans: At the final stanza of the poem, Shelley seeks inspiration in the birds
song for his own purpose, that is, creating poetry. Following the classical
Greek tradition he longs for harmonious madness or the poetic frenzy,
which was considered essential for poetic creativity.

18. **How does Shelley turn the birds song into a source of poetic
inspiration?

Ans: Towards the end of the poem the skylark is transfigured into a sort of
poetic inspiration for the poet as he desperately craves for the possession of
the artistic qualities essential for the creation of his own poetry.

19. *What is Shelleys philosophy implicit in the flight of the bird?

Ans: Shelley, following flight of the soul described by Plato in his Phaedrus,
preaches his idealistic philosophy that, if human beings want at all to reach
at the level of perfect happiness and joy, they must rise above the mundane
existence.

20. **What is the difference between Shelleys skylark and that of

Wordsworth?

Ans: Wordsworths skylark in his poem To the Skylark is a creature of flesh

and blood, while Shelleys skylark is a philosophical abstraction. It despises
the cares and anxieties of the world while Wordsworths has its eyes fixed on
its nest on the ground.