The Skylark is a perfect example of an ode at its best. It is full of life and joy. It sparkles in every line and vies in music with the song of the lark himself.
“Hail to thee, blithe spirit!—
Bird thou never wert.”—
Those two lines are to be taken as the key note of the whole lyric. It is the spirit of free and perfect melody that Shelley is addressing, melody that comes from heaven or near it, that bubbles from the full heart, that is free from rules and conventions, unpremeditated, yet all art. It is “Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.” “What thou art we know not,” yet thou art like a poet hidden singing hymns unbidden; like a high-born maiden soothing her love-laden soul in secret; like a hidden glowworm scattering its hues unbeholden; like a rose embowered in its leaves making faint the thieving winds with its heavy scent. Its music surpasses the delicate sounds of vernal showers on the twinkling grass, the beauty of the rain-awakened flowers, and all that ever was clear and fresh and joyous. Such is the song.
“What are the thoughts that inspire such heavenly melody?” the poet cries. “Teach us, teach us thy sweet thoughts. I have never heard such a flood of rapture so divine. Matched with thy music the noblest marriage hymn, the grandest Te Deum would be but an empty boast. From what fountains springs thy happy strain? Is it from fields, or waves or mountains, from strange shapes of the sky and plain? Is it from ignorance of pain, from love of thine own kind that the joyous music comes? Certainly thou lovest, but there can be no weariness in thy keen joy, no shadow of annoyance. How different we!
“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.”
“To me, the poet, thy skill would be better than all the measures of delightful sound, than all the treasures found in books and if I could sing one half as well as thou, the world would listen to me entranced as I am listening to thee.”
If the song of the lark is beautiful, the song of the poet is not surpassed. The riotous spirit of music sings in every line, beauty is seen in every stanza, is lavished upon every phrase, upon every melodious verse. The prodigality of beautiful phrases is marvelous. The phrases descriptive of the bird alone are strikingly apt and numerous:
“Blithe spirit”; “bird thou never wert”; “like a cloud of fire”; “like an unbodied joy”; “like a star of heaven”; “like a poet hidden in the light of thought”; “like a highborn maiden in a palace tower”; “like a glowworm golden”; “like a rose embowered”; “sprite and bird”; “thou scorner of the ground.”