A Short Video of a Skylark "skylarking"
To a Sky-Lark
(first part based on John L. Mahoney's "Teaching 'To a Sky-lark' in Relation to Shelley's Defense")
From Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821)
But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order,
are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and
architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of
laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts
of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the
beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the
invisible world which is called religion . . . Poets, according to the
circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called,
in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet
essentially comprises and unites both these characters . . . A poet
participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as
relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not. (922-923)
Contrast between
- the skylark (sky, flight, ascendency, purity, joy, transcendence) and
- the human condition (earth-bound, languor, annoyance, sadness, pain, death)
The logic or rhetoric of the poem—emotions: is it mere gush? A
spontaneous overflow?
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls
open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight
. . . A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer
its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by
the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and
softened, yet know not whence or why. (923)
Stanzas 1-6 (lines 1-30):
- the poet’s emotional greeting
- celebration of the bird and its song
Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most
refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with the
evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the
representation of a scene or a passion will touch the enchanted chord,
and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the
sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes
immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests
the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life . . .
(927)
- The poet’s struggle to describe the bird, the song, and the experience
Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and
circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science,
and that to which all science must be referred. . . What were virtue,
love, patriotism, friendship-what were the scenery of this beautiful
universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of
the grave-and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not
ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the
owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? Poetry is not like
reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the
will. A man cannot say, "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even
cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some
invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
brightness; this power arises from within, like the color of a flower
which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions
of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.
(926)
Stanzas 7-12 (lines 31- 60):
- Develops the opening invocation to the skylark in an excited but carefully constructed unit of questioning: “What thou art we know not” but then tries to know
- How does he try to describe the experience?
Stanzas 13-21 (lines 61- 105):
-
Review
- First part—address to the bird
- Second part—struggle to understand it
- Third part—final prayer (plea) for inspiration
- The poet asks Teach us what sweet thought are thine
- The contrast between the bird and the human: Is this breach permanent? Or does the poem suggest that we can learn even “half the gladness” of the song and that others will hear our song?
. . . poetry acts in another and diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges
the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand
unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the
hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they
were not familiar . . . The great secret of morals is love; or a going
out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be
greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and
pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of
moral good is the imagination . . . (924)
The Consolation of Shelley’s Adonais
Concluding verses of Prometheus Unbound
To suffer woes which
Hope thinks infinite; [4.570]
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; [4.575]
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; [4.575]
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.
No comments:
Post a Comment