Mortality

As the poem progresses and Shelley’s adulation of the skylark begins to climax, the poet contrasts the concerns of mere mortals to those of the bird. The sixteenth stanza is a prime example of this: “With thy clear keen joyance / Languor cannot be: / Shadow of annoyance / Never came near thee: / Thou lovest: but ne'er knew love's sad satiety” (76-80). Human experiences of love, Shelley postulates, are all wrapped up in a melancholic acknowledgment of the ultimate suffering.

This so often takes the form of rumination and anxiety over human mortality, as the seventeenth stanza elaborates: “Waking or asleep, / Thou of death must deem / Things more true and deep / Than we mortals dream, / Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?” (81-85). Suggested in these passages is the idea that the skylark, as a quasi-diving being, has a more intimate knowledge of the...