Firstly, I must preface my statements by stating that this poem caused my head to swim, and that I was, I confess, a slight bit caught up by its richness and artistry. As such, I will do my best to maintain some semblance of coherent thought and succinctness.
Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark” is constructed of 21 stanzas containing an ABABB rhyme scheme. In summary, it deals with the speaker’s encounter of a skylark and the manner by which he goes about establishing its song as an allegory of happiness. The first six stanzas of the poem are a laudatory encomium of the Skylark’s qualities and characteristics. The speaker begins, “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!”, suggesting through the use of the word “blithe,” that the Skylark is being imbued with possessing a sentiment of indifference toward the speaker. The speaker is aware of the bird, yet the bird exists in a realm incongruent to the speaker. This is evidenced by the manner in which the speaker compares the bird to the sun and the moon. Neither the celestial beings nor the birds existence are predicated upon mans existence. Despite this initial separation, the speaker attempts to create a connection to the bird in the sixth stanza when he questions, “What is most like thee?” The connection is drawn for the reader in stanzas 8-12 when the speaker constructs a litany of similes by which he attempts to analogize the Skylark and humanity. The first analogy comes in the manner of juxtaposing the Skylark’s song with a poet. The song is described as “unbidden” in line 38, and can be seen as comparable to poetry in that both forms of expression spring forth as unsolicited by any exterior entity. Both poet and bird create for the sake of creation, yet somehow, manage to influence the spaces in which they exist.
The catalogue of similes also attempts to draw parallels through the use of sensory perception. Stanzas 8-12 each deal with various senses such as sight, smell, and touch, and appeal to the readers faculties as a means to further create a parallel through which the realm of the bird and the speaker might be viewed as analogous. This “analogizing” is meant to be the speakers attempt at hoping that the Skylark’s happiness is, indeed, attainable, which I will now attempt to explore.
In the thirteenth stanza, line 60, the speaker moves his notions of the bird from the realm of sensory allegory, into the realm of pedagogy in stating, “Teach us Sprite or Bird / What thoughts are thine”. Firstly, it must be stated that the speaker never provides the reader with a reason for the birds joy. However, the speaker does postulate about what could be the source of the birds happiness. In stanza 15 the speaker poses rhetorical questions regarding the source of the birds happiness, while 16 and 17 deal with the speakers projection, or, reason for the bird’s happiness in that the bird has never known the negative characteristics of the human psyche. The realm in which the bird exists is divorced from all sadness, annoyance, rejection, and even death. Because the bird already knows what proceeds death, he is able to exist without fear of pain, which the speaker postulates as the source of all human sadness. In stanza 19, however, the speaker creates a paradox in which he states that through the abandonment of all negative human characteristics, humanity would be rendered incapable of internalizing the “joy” of the Skylark’s song. This, to my interpretation, is the most curious aspect of the poem in that only six stanzas prior to 19, the speaker views the bird as a pedagogical entity from which he desires to learn the secret of happiness. However, in stanza 19, the speaker acknowledges that in the acquisition of this source of happiness, the speaker would be rendered incapable of appreciating the very inspiration for what sent him down this philosophical quest in the first place!
The Skylark is, once again, relegated to a pedagogical space in the final stanza when the speaker request, “Teach me half thy gladness / That thy brain must know,” so, it would seem, that the speaker has managed to formulate a loophole in which he can have his "happy" cake and eat it too… Despite the fact that I am somewhat dissatisfied with the manner in which the speaker has chosen to alleviate his philosophical anxieties, I would question whether others agree with the speaker in his assertion that the joy cannot exist in a world entirely divorced from pain.
Consider the following:
- Do you agree with the speaker when he states that humanity could not know the joy that the Skylark possesses if we existed in a world void of pain?
- For the sake of brevity, I was unable to explore the following question in my post, but hope to in class when I ask: being that Shelley was anti-slavery, when he writes in line 15, “Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun” what are the implications of reading “race” as implicit of ethnicity, versus competition?
The speaker does precisely what you say at the outset of the poem, acknowledging the radical disconnect between himself and the bird, and then attempting to produce a connection regardless of the recognition. The poem is centrally concerned with the problem of projection (in the series of similes) and the condition of unknowability (“What thou art we know not”). The speaker cannot divine the cause of the bird’s joyous song precisely because of an ontological difference between humans and birds: the bird doesn’t know in the same way that human beings know, a condition Shelley isolates in stanzas 16-18. As you rightly point out, this leads the speaker to a second realization: if human art was not tinctured with sadness and pain he could never “come near” the skylarks joy. This contradictory position rests on the fundamental conditions of knowledge and self-awareness, those things that make humans human. The question, then, is whether the speaker actually believes he can learn even “half the gladness”—perhaps the half is the crucial concept here? He is not striving for a world devoid of pain but the ability to “know” half of what is in the skylark’s brain. If this is possible is an entirely different question, but the final stanza suggests the speaker’s desire to know has not been quashed by his admission of the impossibility of this desire.
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