Today’s Poem: To a Skylark

I am listening now

Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Field with Poppies and Lark, 1887 (Wikimedia Commons)

---

To a Skylark

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

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 light’ning
        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—

      Keen as are the arrows
        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 overflow’d.

      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:

      Like a glow-worm golden
        In a dell of dew,
      Scattering unbeholden
        Its aërial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view:

      Like a rose embower’d
        In its own green leaves,
      By warm winds deflower’d,
        Till the scent it gives
Makes faint with too much sweet these heavy-wingèd thieves

      Sound of vernal showers
        On the twinkling grass,
      Rain-awaken’d 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,
      Match’d with thine would be all
        But an empty vaunt —
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

      What objects are the fountains
        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.
═══════════════════════

Today’s Poem, by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), appeared in 1820, the same year as the poet’s major work, Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts. The 28-year-old Shelley, having run away to the Continent with the 16-year-old Mary Godwin six years earlier (abandoning Harriet Westbrook, also 16 when Shelley eloped with her to Scotland in 1811), was settled in Italy, though not as happily as, perhaps, a neo-Promethean figure loosed from repressive social bonds might have anticipated.

His establishment with Mary, their children, and their various lovers, had long operated on a principle of evasion — of creditors, chiefly, but also of disapproving relatives and friends. On Harriet’s suicide in 1816 he had attempted to gain custody of their two children, but had failed on grounds of his atheism and adultery, and the children had been remanded into foster care. Three of his four children with Mary were dead: a premature daughter born and buried in 1815, the year-old Clara Evelina in 1818, and a son, William, aged 3, in 1819.

The Prometheus — meant as a “closet drama,” to be performed not on a stage but in the reader’s imagination — is Shelley’s answer to and completion of Aeschylus, the Greek tragedian whose Prometheus Bound is the lone survivor of a trilogy of plays on the mythic figure. According to myth, Prometheus gives fire to mankind and is sentenced by the gods to be lashed to a crag, where birds eat his liver daily. But Shelley’s Prometheus is also a perfected type of Milton’s Satan, from Paradise Lost, whom Shelley considered to be heroic in his rebellion but marred by malice, envy, and the desire for vengeance.

“Prometheus,” Shelley wrote in his preface to the work,

is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.

That Shelley viewed himself as a Prometheus — Milton’s Satan, but without the corruption — he makes clear in the same preface. “Let this opportunity be conceded to me of acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically terms a ‘passion for reforming the world.’ . . . I had rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley and Malthus.” One means of reform, and perhaps the only one not imperiled by the prospect of unintended consequences, is to bring the fire of poetry to a mankind struggling in a dark, tyrannical world.

We may judge Shelley’s declared principle of radical human freedom by its real-life outcomes, particularly the grief of the women who attached themselves to him. Of all the Romantics, it’s Shelley who may most exasperate us and most elude, on a personal level, the reach of our natural sympathy.

Alfred Clint, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1819

And yet. And yet. “To a Skylark” strikes like a new fire in the dark of February. “Hail to thee, blithe spirit” is as exhilarating an opening as “Sing, Muse” — not a declaration so much as an invocation, pointing to a wellspring of inspiration outside, though overlapping, the speaker’s own personality. The I that in other Shelley poems of the same period, notably “Ode to the West Wind,” calls attention to itself as it falls upon the thorns of life and bleeds, here assumes a stance of listening humility, as the bird pours out its rapturous call.

It’s difficult not to think of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” written eighty years later, in light of this poem of Shelley’s. In the later poem, the speaker’s mood has lost the Romantic burnish of belief that human beings may access, in observed joy, the source of that joy. Hardy’s thrush itself is “aged,” “frail, gaunt and small,” a last gasp of transcendence in the growing night. Its song is an act of hope, but that hope is lost on him.

By contrast, the thrush’s progenitor, Shelley’s lark, is wholly a bird of the springtime, and more: “sprite or bird.” Its song, like moonlight, expands to suffuse the entire cosmos. The poem’s form, trimeter abab stanzas that resolve on a fifth hexameter b-rhyme line, echoes the contracting and swelling of that song of desire, and of the listener’s soul that admits the song into itself, an elixir of desire and creative fecundity that seems to breathe the world into fresh being.

This speaker is the Prometheus Shelley aspired to be and, in life, failed to be. In this poem we find, to borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s words, “the goodness [the man] could find when ransacking himself.” He has loosed his bonds and reconciled himself to the order of a creation that provided him with fire in the first place. The birds no longer devour, but inspire, instruct, and impart life. “The world should listen then, as I am listening now.”

---

---