19 pages • 38 minutes read
To a Skylark
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“To a Skylark” is an ode. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines ode as a “formal, ceremonious, and complexly organized form of lyric poetry, usually of considerable length” (p. 971). Shelley created a form for the poem to emulate the song of the skylark. This form includes 105 lines broken into 21 stanzas. Each five-line stanza, or cinquain, has an ABABB rhyme scheme, which gives the poem a musical quality and connects the rhyming words.
Each stanza uses two meters—one metrical structure for the first four lines and a different structure for the last line of each stanza. The first four lines of each stanza are in trochaic trimeter, which consists of three metrical feet: Each foot contains a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. For example, Line 6 metrically scans: “Higher | still and | higher,” like the flapping of bird wings in flight.
The final line of each stanza is in iambic hexameter, which is also called an alexandrine. Iambic hexameter is six metrical feet, where each foot contains an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. For instance, Line 30 metrically scans: “The moon | rains out | her beams | and Hea- | ven is | overflowed.” This metrical pattern gives variation from the preceding four lines in its stanza. The alexandrine is known as the ending of the Spenserian stanza (which Shelley used in other poetry).
Simile
Shelley uses numerous similes—direct comparisons using the words “like” or “as”—in “To a Skylark” to define or understand the skylark’s nature. The first simile that includes the word “like” appears in the second stanza, and compares the skylark to a “cloud of fire” (Line 8). After this, similes using the comparative word “like” appear in Stanzas Three, Four, Eight, Nine, Ten, and Eleven: The skylark is like joy, a star, a Poet, a maiden, a glow-worm, and a rose, respectively. These comparisons seek to answer the question “What is most like thee?” (Line 32)
Other stanzas include similes using the comparative word “as.” Stanzas Five and Six have slightly more complicated analogies, comparing the song of the skylark to celestial objects, such as “arrows” (Line 21) in constellations and moonbeams. These comparisons develop the descriptions of concealment and music. The similes including “like” and “as” can be contrasted with later stanzas in the poem. Several of these stanzas discuss what is dissimilar, or unlike, the skylark—specifically humans.
Repetition
“To a Skylark” contains several distinct kinds of repetition. In the stanzas, Shelley uses anaphora: the repetition of a single word in subsequent lines. Stanzas Eight, Nine, Ten, and Eleven all begin with the word “like.” The repetition of the word gives the stanzas a list, or catalogue, structure.
Within the lines, Shelley uses alliteration: the repetition of a letter at the beginning of subsequent, or nearby, words. For example, the letter “s” is repeated in phrases such as “silver sphere” (Line 22). Another example of alliteration using the letter “s” is also a repetition of the same words in a different order, which is called antimetabole: “And singing still does soar, and soaring ever singest” (Line 10). The words “soar” and “sing” are repeated, but their syntax (or order) is reversed.
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By Percy Bysshe Shelley
