Articles and Commentaries by Aden Lee, Skylark Press Studio Shelley's Skylark | Page 14

potentially inspire the skylark. In Line 3, Shelley uses another rhetorical technique known as polysyndeton which involves the use of successive conjunctions between words to create rhythmic emphasis. Shelley uses this emphasis to portray the ubiquity of nature’s beauty: here, the conjunction “or” links “fields”, “waves” and “mountains” in a series, and is further paralleled by another list: “sky or plain” in the next line. Shelley ends the stanza by employing parallelism (the repetition of a syntactical pattern across several clauses or lines) for rhetorical and rhythmic emphasis: “What shapes of” is paralleled in the final line by “What love of” and “what ignorance of”. The final stanza is the most moving part of the poem, and establishes Shelley’s final theme: nature’s inspirational effect on the individual. 21 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. © Skylark Press Studio 2016 13/19