Again all the words rise and float. Sing them over: higher, higher, springest, fire, wingest, singing, soar, soaring, singest. The reader must feel himself poised for flight in every word of the first three verses. Why does the poet say cloud of fire? What is the color of the skylark? And now the tone, which has been of a radiant hue through these three verses, must soften a little in the first three lines of the next verse—
The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;—
glow gold again in the last three lines—
Like a star of heaven
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, and yet I hear thy shrill delight—
and become the white of an incandescent light in the next verse—
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.
Do you not see that the secret of its beauty lies, for vocal interpretation, in the color of tone and in the inflection of the words? Say "unseen," dwelling on the second syllable; "shrill delight," directing shrill over the head of delight; "keen," making it cleave the air like an arrow; "silver sphere," suggesting a moonlit path across water; "intense" and "narrows," letting the tone recede into the "white dawn"; "see," with a vanishing stress; and "feel," with a deepening note carried to the end. So we might go on through the twenty-one stanzas which make up the poem.
Please analyze undirected the next two verses.
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.