Articles and Commentaries by Aden Lee, Skylark Press Studio Shelley's Skylark | Page 4

transitions to one of his poem’s main themes–nature’s
innate divinity–by describing the skylark as a transcendent
“Spirit” that sings “from Heaven”. As a divine singer, the
skylark sings with utmost sincerity and complete abandon:
it devotes its “full heart” to producing “profuse” streams of
music. Importantly, Shelley describes the skylark’s song as
being “unpremeditated”: he implies that unlike human art
which is laboriously contrived and inevitably artificial,
nature’s art is produced effortlessly, spontaneously and
thus, is intrinsically perfect. By establishing this dichotomy
between human art and nature’s art, Shelley asserts that
the skylark’s song is true art precisely because it is artless.
form
Apart from its evocative diction, stanza 1 is also notable for
its remarkable form. Form refers to a poem’s structure,
which comprises of elements such as the number of lines in
a stanza, the number of syllables and their patterns of
stress in each line (this configuration is known as meter),
and the pattern of rhyming words at the end of each line
(this pattern is known as rhyme scheme). In the poem–
particularly in stanza 1–Shelley masterfully manipulates

© Skylark Press Studio 2016

3/19