To a Skylark

First page of the original manuscript to "To a Skylark"
1820 publication in the Prometheus Unbound collection.
1820 cover of Prometheus Unbound, C. and J. Ollier, London.

"To a Skylark" is a poem completed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in late June 1820 and published accompanying his lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound by Charles and James Ollier in London.[1]

It was inspired by an evening walk in the country near Livorno, Italy, with his wife Mary Shelley, and describes the appearance and song of a skylark they come upon.[2] Mary Shelley described the event that inspired Shelley to write "To a Skylark": "In the Spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn (Livorno) ... It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark."

Alexander Mackie argued in 1906 that the poem, along with John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale", "are two of the glories of English literature": "The nightingale and the lark for long monopolised poetic idolatry—a privilege they enjoyed solely on account of their pre-eminence as songbirds. Keats's Ode to a Nightingale and Shelley's Ode to a Skylark are two of the glories of English literature, but both were written by men who had no claim to a special or exact knowledge of ornithology as such."[3]

  1. ^ Sandy, Mark (21 March 2002). "To a Skylark". The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 9 January 2006.
  2. ^ Sandy 2002. Retrieved 2006-01-09.
  3. ^ Mackie, Alexander (1906), Nature Knowledge in Modern Poetry. New York: Longmans-Green & Company, OCLC 494286564. p. 29.