I recall studying Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ as a teenager, i.e., at a time when football results mattered more to me than birdsong. I was surprised to discover recently that the poem is much, much longer than the version we studied – it has twenty-one stanzas. I’d looked it up again because it’s the one sound that stops me briefly when I walk along Cowbar, that thrilling, trilling song that clearly affects many more than me – in ‘The Poetry of Birds’, for example, there are poems from six others who felt moved to compose lines about it, sharing top spot with nightingales and swallows.
In ‘The Lark Ascending’ by George Meredith, that little bird “is joy, awake, aglow” and for Isaac Rosenberg, too … “But hark! Joy – joy – strange joy.” In the latter case, Rosenberg was writing from a WW1 trench at a time when, for him and his fellows, “death could drop from the dark/ as easily as song”.
Skylarks obviously don’t sing for our joy, just as poppies don’t bloom for our delight but isn’t it good to live in and maintain a world where such manifestations of nature exist? So, “hail to thee, blithe Spirit!”
