To A Skylark Lyrics
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.
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.
In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are bright'ning.
Thou dost float and run;
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight,
Of that silver sphere,
Whose intense lamp narrows
In the white dawn clear
Until we hardly see—we feel that it is there.
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.
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.
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:
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:
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aereal hue
Among the flowers and grass, which screen it from the view!
Like a rose embowered
In its own green leaves,
By warm winds deflowered,
Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet those heavy-winged thieves:
Sound of vernal showers
On the twinkling grass,
Rain-awakened flowers,
All that ever was
Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass:
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.
Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Matched with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
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?
With thy clear keen joyance
Languor 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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
About
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
- 3.To Harriet
- 6.Mutability
- 7.On Death
- 11.The Sunset
- 13.Fragment: Home
- 14.Marianne’s Dream
- 16.Stanzas 1 And 2
- 17.To Constantia
- 21.‘Mighty Eagle’
- 25.On Fanny Godwin
- 27.Death
- 28.Otho
- 36.A Hate-Song
- 38.Ozymandias
- 39.To The Nile
- 41.The Past
- 42.To Mary —
- 57.Song For ‘Tasso’
- 61.Marenghi
- 72.National Anthem
- 74.Cancelled Stanza
- 76.An Exhortation
- 82.To Mary Shelley
- 100.The Cloud
- 101.To A Skylark
- 102.Ode To Liberty
- 103.Arethusa
- 105.Hymn Of Apollo
- 106.Hymn Of Pan
- 107.The Question
- 108.Autumn: A Dirge
- 109.The Waning Moon
- 110.To The Moon
- 111.Liberty
- 112.Summer And Winter
- 113.The Tower Of Famine
- 114.An Allegory
- 116.Lines To A Reviewer
- 118.Good-Night
- 119.Buona Notte
- 120.Orpheus
- 121.Fiordispina
- 122.Time Long Past
- 133.Dirge For The Year
- 135.Time
- 137.To Emilia Viviani
- 138.The Fugitives
- 139.Song
- 143.The Aziola
- 144.A Lament
- 145.Remembrance
- 146.To Edward Williams
- 147.Epithalamium
- 151.Ginevra
- 154.Music
- 155.Sonnet To Byron
- 156.Fragment On Keats
- 158.To-Morrow
- 159.Fragment: A Wanderer
- 164.Fragment: Rain
- 175.The Zucca
- 185.The Isle
- 187.Epitaph