To a Skylark

First page of the original manuscript to "To a Skylark"

1820 publication in the Prometheus Unbound collection.

1820 cover of Prometheus Unbound, C. and J. Ollier, London.

"To a Skylark" is a poem completed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in late June 1820 and published accompanying his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound by Charles and James Collier in London.^[1]

It was inspired by an evening walk in the country near Livorno, Italy, with his wife Mary Shelley, and describes the appearance and song of a skylark they come upon.^[2] Mary Shelley described the event that inspired Shelley to write "To a Skylark": "In the Spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn (Livorno) ... It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark."

Influence

The 1941 comic play Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward takes its title from the opening line:

"Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert".

Thomas Hardy wrote the poem "Shelley's Skylark" which referenced the work in 1887 after a trip to Leghorn or Livorno, Italy.^[3]

In 1894, music by British composer Arthur Goring Thomas was set to verses from the work in the composition The Swan and the Skylark: Cantata orchestrated by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.^[4]

References

Sources

• Hunter, Parks, C., Jr. "Undercurrents of Anacreontics in Shelley's 'To a Skylark' and 'The Cloud'. Studies in Philology, Vol. 65, No. 4 (Jul. 1968), pp. 677–692.
• Burt, Mary Elizabrth, ed. Poems That Every Child Should Know. BiblioBazaar, 2009. First published in 1904 in New York by Doubleday, Page & Company.
• Cervo, Nathan. "Hopkins' 'The Caged Skylark' and Shelley's 'To a Skylark.'" Explicator, 47.1(1988): 16–20.
• McClelland, Fleming. "Shelley's 'To a Sky-Lark.'" Explicator, 47.1 (1988): 15–16.
• Mahoney, John L. "Teaching 'To a Sky-Lark' in Relation to Shelley's Defense." Hall, Spencer (ed.). Approaches to Teaching Shelley's Poetry. New York: MLA, 1990. 83–85.
• Lewitt, Philip Jay. "Hidden Voices: Bird-Watching in Shelley, Keats, and Whitman." Kyushu American Literature, 28 (1987): 55–63.
• Ulmer, William A. "Some Hidden Want: Aspiration in 'To a Sky-Lark.'" Studies in Romanticism, 23.2 (1984): 245–58.
• Meihuizen, N. "Birds and Bird-Song in Wordsworth, Shelley and Yeats: The Study of a Relationship between Three Poems." English Studies in Africa, 31.1 (1988): 51–63.
• MacEachen, Dougald B. CliffsNotes on Shelley's Poems. 18 July 2011^[1]
• SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Shelley’s Poetry.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 11 Jul 2011.
• Behrendt, Stephen C. Shelley and His Audiences. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 1989.
• O'Neil, Michael. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Literary Life. The MacMillan Press, Ltd.: London, 1989.
• Tomalin, Claire. Shelley and His World. Thames and Hudson, Ltd.: London, 1980.
• White, Ivey Newman. Portrait of Shelley. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: New York, 1945.
• Zillman, Lawrence John. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1959.

External links

Wikisource has original text related to this article: To a Skylark

• Audiorecording of "To a Skylark" read by Kara Shallenberg on LibriVox, track 64, from Poems Every Child Should Know (1904), Mary E. Burt, ed.
• Online version on Bartleby.com.
• Shelley's Skylark: A Facsimile of the Original Manuscript. Cambridge, MA: Library of Harvard University, 1888.

1. ↑ "Literature Notes - Homework Help - Study Guides - Test Prep - CliffsNotes". Retrieved 23 September 2014.