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

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