To a Skylark, hail to thee, blithe spirit

Percy Bysshe Shelley published 1820 454 characters medium

Hail to thee, blithe spirit— Bird thou never wert— That from heaven or near it Pourest thy full heart In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest, Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest, And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest. In the golden lightning Of the sunken sun, O’er which clouds are bright’ning, Thou dost float and run, Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

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About this text

Shelley wrote this poem in the summer of 1820 near Livorno in Italy, after an evening walk with his wife Mary. It was printed that year with his verse drama Prometheus Unbound. The bird is never described, only heard, which is why the poem keeps reaching for comparisons. Wikisource carries the anthology text.

Where this text comes fromThe text linked below comes from a children’s anthology rather than from the 1820 volume where the poem first appeared alongside Prometheus Unbound, and anthology editors tend to smooth things. What you copy is the opening: the greeting, the refusal to call the bird a bird, and the first flight upward. The poem runs to twenty-one stanzas and spends nearly all of them looking for a comparison that will hold, which is the point, because Shelley heard the skylark and never saw it.

What you might not noticeThe anthology text keeps the elision bright’ning, with an apostrophe standing in for the letter e. Modern reprints of the 1820 volume usually spell the word out and lose the syllable count Shelley was keeping. Source

What it trainsThe word to watch is unpremeditated: fourteen letters, six of them vowels alternating with consonants in a pattern the hand has no muscle memory for, and it arrives at the end of a long line when concentration is lowest. Just after it comes bright’ning, where an apostrophe sits between two consonants instead of before an s. Two long dashes close the first two lines, and the plain hyphen carries both; nothing else in the passage uses that key. Fifteen capitals in 454 characters, and every one of them stands at the start of a verse line.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource