For my reading of this poem I want to look at the shift, starting on line 61, where Shelly transitions from describing and praising the skylark to trying to learn from it through its song.
The speaker of the poem is entranced by the happiness that and wonders what could inspire such happiness in the bird. The answer lies in line 75 when he suggests that the birds happiness lies in his "ignorance of pain". The speaker believes this type of ignorance would also bring happiness to humans and suggests that humans could create this ignorance somehow by "[scorning]/ Hate, and pride, and fear" but he mostly thinks of this blissful ignorance as something that a being has to be born with and he envies the skylark for his happiness. He believes the happiness that could be found through ignorance would be better than anything that man can dream up as he is now.
Shelly is suggesting that it is the skylark that is the superior being rather than man because what use is man's intelligence if he can't be happy? The skylark is blissful and beautiful, while man is sad and critical. Even knowing that the price of the skylark's happiness is a rejection of complex thought, the speaker still wants to learn from the bird. The speaker wants the happiness that the skylark has, but even by wanting it, he already can't obtain it. The skylark is really just a a pretty bird that sings a pretty song. It cannot want for things the way the speaker does, so already the speaker is too far from the bird to actually be able to obtain what it has.
Questions:
Is the bird actually "happy"? Does the poem suggest that happiness is truly a thing that exists outside of the experience of pain and sadness, or is the speaker projecting his wishes for himself onto the skylark?
In the last stanza, the speaker is still asking the bird to teach him, but how can the speaker learn more from the skylark than what he already reasoned out about its happiness coming from ignorance?
Shelley’s speaker does ask the bird to “teach us” “what sweet thoughts are thine” (61-2), but it would seem he is not entirely convinced this is possible. When he speculates on what would happen “if we could scorn / Hate, and pride, and fear,” his conclusion is “I know not how thy joy we ever should come near” (91, 95). Not only does he say it is not possible for humans to get rid of emotions like hate and fear, but he also suggests that if we could get rid of these emotions, we couldn’t get “near” the bird’s joy. The problem here is knowledge: he says “I know not” because if humans no longer had these emotions, they would also lose the self-consciousness that makes us human. This is the poem’s fundamental conundrum: we can’t know what makes the bird happy because the bird doesn’t know in the same way that humans know. The poem does seem to elevate the skylark’s state of being above man’s, but it is more fundamentally concerned with what our capacity and desire for knowledge makes possible, and what it makes impossible. We might see the poem as a long exercise in projection, except that it continually calls attention to the act of projecting—the poem’s subject (how to know the bird) is precisely the thing that Shelley dismantles over the course of the poem. To answer your second question, consider how knowledge or knowing appear in the final stanza: has the speaker settled on a solution, or has he just given up? And what are the implications for poetry either way?
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