Percy Shelly: "To a Sky-Lark"

The speaker seems a bit jealous of the freedom of the skylark, which travels where it pleases. It doesn’t matter when or where—“the sunken sun”or“the silver sphere” —the speaker feels that the skylark is always flying high above. Even if we do not see it, or even hear it, “we feel it is there.”
The speaker admits to not knowing whether the bird is happy, however, or from where it receives its joy. Shelly puts five stanzas in the middle of the poem in metaphors, comparing the skylark to other living objects in nature (poets, a maiden, worms, and roses), which express love, pain, and sorrow. None of them, however, has the expressive ability of the singing bird. Shelly hopes to learn about the realm of spirit from the bird, plainly asking to teach him how it manages to continue on with its “rapture so divine” without ever wavering in pain or sorrow. Even the happiest of human songs, like a wedding song (“Chorus hymeneal”), does not compare to the song of a skylark.
The song of the skylark, rather than the skylark itself, is what holds all the power. It is the song that can have the “light of thought” of “the poet,” the “soothing love” of the maiden, invisible existence as the “glow-worm golden,” and the aura of “a rose.” It is this power to awaken so many different parts in nature, and make them aware to the human mind, that Shelley wants to “be taught.”
Eventually, the speaker seems to come to terms with the idea that in some ways, ignorance can be bliss. Yet, this makes the skylark’s joy inhuman. “We look before and after, and pine for what is not,” but a bird lives in the moment. Nevertheless, recognizing the beauty in the simple brain of this skylark, the speaker would be happy to know only “half its gladness,” seeking the ability to inspire others the way he was inspired by the bird.
Shelley’s skylark is symbolizing the relationship between sadness and joy, experience and knowledge, and his desire to only be under the influence of joy and knowledge, even though he knows that is not possible. Finally, beyond recognizing the difference between himself and the glorious song of the skylark, Shelley keeps the hope that someday his words will be heard and heeded the way he is listening to and being inspired by his avian muse.The fifteenth stanza, the question stanza, "What objects are the fountains, or thy happy strain? What fields, or waves, or mountains?  What shapes of sky or plain? What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?" (lines 70-75).  This stanza marks the beginning of Shelley’s separation of the “mortal” from the “spiritual.” Asking questions creates room for Shelly to provide answers. The answer he comes up with is that we, unlike the song of the skylark, are “mortals” capable of “dreaming” sweet melodies. It is not good enough to have unreflective joy, and thus even our “sincerest laughter” is often accompanied with “our saddest thought,” yet this is the reality we must acknowledge.