This time I was purposely searching for a poem that might provide a good title for the music post, so, after trying Chaucer's "Prologue" and Hardy's "Darkling Thrush," I lucked out with "To a Skylark." It is one of my favourite poems, though the poet's grandiloquence (exemplified by his line in another work that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world") gets on my nerves now and then. A species of this grandiloquence that I particularly dislike is the Romantic tendency to identify with and apostrophize a greater power. It reminds me of obnoxious classmates who would constitute themselves co-authorities with the teacher, trying to advance from the ranks of the hoi polloi by keeping the others in order; so, for example, if people talked in the back of the room, they turned around pointedly, with a sanctimonious stare of horrified indignation that would have been proportionate if the delinquents were holding a cannibal feast.

One poetic example is the "Apostrophe to Ocean," as it was called in my English Lit 12 class, from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The narrator expatiates on his love of solitary promenades to the seashore to "Mingle with the universe"; but, despite the exalted privilege of his one-on-one interviews with the Ocean (something like Bush's chats with God, I presume), he still condescends to "love not Man the less, but Nature more" because of them. Then he goes on and on about how men are killed by the sea, and seems rather to relish it. I'll venture a daring literary theory: "he" is actually a misanthropic "she," which is why she can so easily talk of men in the third person. But I should say that, odd bits aside, I like the verses.

In any case, Shelley's poem turned out to be eminently seasonal, and also topical insofar as it concerns music, so here it is:

TO A SKYLARK
— 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 lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightening,
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.

. . .

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.

. . .

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!

Quoted in: A Treasury of English and American Verse, Fritz Krog, Ed.
Hirschgraben Verlag, 1967