教学团队
课程特色
视频(60)
PPT(31)
作业(29)
讨论(12)
文档(28)
考试(1)
最新学员
To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelle
To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelle
‘To a Skylark‘ by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a twenty-one stanza ode that is consistent in it’s rhyme scheme from the very first to the last stanza. The piece rhymes, ABABB, with varying end sounds, from beginning to end.
This strictly formatted pattern is also consistent in meter. The first four lines of each stanza are written in trochaic trimeter, meaning that a stressed syllable comes before an unstressed (trochaic). Additionally, each of the first four lines have three of these beats (trimeter). Different from the other four, but consistent with the rest of the poem, the fifth longer line of each stanza is written in iambic hexameter. This means that each line has six beats of unstressed syllables preceding stressed.
It is also important to make note of the speaker in “To a Skylark.” As has been revealed in poems such as “Ode to the West Wind,” this piece is based on an actual experience the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, had. Therefore, the poet himself will be considered as the speaker of the poem.
Summary of To a Skylark
“To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley is an ode to the “blithe” essence of a singing skylark and how human beings are unable to ever reach that same bliss.
The poem begins with the speaker spotting a skylark flying above him. He can hear the song clearly. The bird’s song “unpremeditated,” it is unplanned and beautiful.
Shelley is stunned by the music produced by the bird and entranced by it’s movement as it flies into the clouds and out of sight. Although he can no longer see it, he is still able to hear it and feel it’s presence. The bird represents a pure, unbridled happiness that Shelley is desperately seeking. This desperation comes through in the next stanzas.
The poet then embarks on a number of metaphors through which he is hoping to better understand what the bird is and what he can accurately compare it to. He sees the bird as a “high-born maiden” that serenades her lover below her and spring, or “vernal,” showers that rain on the flowers below. The skylark is like “rainbow clouds” and the epitome of all “Joyous” things.
The next section of the ode is used to ask the skylark to reveal what inspires it to such glorious song. Is it, the poet asks, “fields, or waves, or mountains?” Could it be, he speculates, “shapes of sky or plain?” Whatever it may be, Shelley has never seen anything that could force such sounds from his own voice.
He states that for a creature to have the ability to sing in such a way, it must know nothing of sorrow or “annoyance.” The bird must have the ability to see beyond life, understand death, and feel no concern about it. This is why humans may never reach the same state of happiness that the skylark exists within. “We” pine for things that we do not have, and even our “sweetest songs” are full of the “saddest thought[s].”
The poem concludes with the poet pleading with the bird to “Teach [him] half the gladness / That thy brain must know.” Even that small amount would provide Shelley with the ability to produce “harmonious madness” that would force the world to listen to him must as raptly as he is listening to the skylark now.
0 回复
- 还没有回复，赶快添加一个吧！
添加回复
您确定给 “0” 位老师发送协议吗？
UMOOCS用户服务协议
问题分类：
--
4008987008