To A Skylark Lyrics

How to Format Lyrics:

  • Type out all lyrics, even repeating song parts like the chorus
  • Lyrics should be broken down into individual lines
  • Use section headers above different song parts like [Verse], [Chorus], etc.
  • Use italics (<i>lyric</i>) and bold (<b>lyric</b>) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part
  • If you don’t understand a lyric, use [?]

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About

Genius Annotation

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), has been described as one of the ‘Big Six’ Romantic poets, along with Coleridge, Blake, Wordsworth, Byron and Keats.

Romantic Poetry

A tenet of Romantic poetry is its focus on nature and man’s insignificance in comparison to the natural world. This was a subject of particular interest to the poet Wordsworth. Shelley, however, was concerned with regeneration of his spiritual and poetic self, and regeneration of Europe politically. It was a turbulent time when the Napoleonic Wars had not long ended and Europe was in a state of flux and unrest. In England the infamous Peterloo Massacre had occurred in August 1819, when cavalry charged into a crowd demonstrating against poor economic conditions and lack of parliamentary representation in the north of England.

The same way Keats famously rejoices at an urn without expecting a response, Shelley rhetorically speaks to a skylark– a literary technique called an apostrophe. This and Ode to the West Wind are his most well-known odes, both published two years before his death in Prometheus Unbound (1820).

Shelley, upon hearing the skylark’s song, wishes his feelings for the bird to last forever like its song. He compares the bird to many things, wishing he were as happy as its song. He not only describes the bird’s physical being but also its essential spiritual nature, and relates it to human aspirations.

All of the ode’s 21 stanzas are in an ABABB rhyme scheme, with all lines in trochaic trimeter, except the long fifth line of every stanza, which is in iambic hexameter.

Rhythmically the poem works perfectly, as if imitating the springy, soaring, irregular flight of the bird.

Q&A

Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning

  1. 27.
    Death
  2. 28.
    Otho
  3. 101.
    To A Skylark
  4. 111.
    Liberty
  5. 120.
    Orpheus
  6. 135.
    Time
  7. 139.
    Song
  8. 151.
    Ginevra
  9. 154.
    Music
  10. 187.
    Epitaph
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