Point of View

“To a Skylark” is written from the perspective of a speaker who is beholding and addressing a skylark. Percy Shelley’s position as the poem’s author and the speaker overlap considerably. According to his wife, the novelist Mary Shelley, “To a Skylark” was inspired by a walk that the couple took together one evening in the countryside surrounding the town of Livorno, in the Tuscany region of Italy in 1820.

Written in the lyrical tradition of the ode, “To a Skylark” takes the form of a rhetorical address to a bird whom the speaker encounters in nature. As is conventional in this form of poetic verse, the speaker asks the subject of the ode a series of questions that pertain to its lovely and unparalleled qualities. In “To a Skylark,” Shelley poses rhetorical questions that compare the aesthetic grace and prowess of the bird to...