Articles and Commentaries by Aden Lee, Skylark Press Studio Shelley's Skylark | Page 10

Now, why would Shelley purposely place such a long line
here, where his previous lines were six syllables at most?
The answer lies in what he is trying to describe: the
skylark’s “profuse” song. Through this alexandrine,
Shelley achieves a variety of rhetorical and sonic effects:
• By suddenly elongating his poem’s fifth line, Shelley
creates the illusion of spontaneity in his poem to parallel
the Skylark’s spontaneous, “unpremeditated” song;
• Metrically, the lengthy alexandrine represents the
irrepressible, uncontainable flow of birdsong which, due
to its acoustic beauty and complexity, figuratively bursts
the confines of Shelley’s earlier six-syllable lines. This
uncontainability is further accentuated by Shelley’s use of
the six-syllabled “unpremeditated” which, in its
lengthiness, emulates the bird’s fluid and “profuse” song.
• Normally, alexandrines have a caesura, or pause,
immediately after the sixth syllable to neatly divide the
line into two sections of six syllables each; take the
alexandrine from stanza 15 of this poem for example:
“What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of
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