To a Sky-Lark

This poem starts with the speaking directly to a “blithe Spirit” (402), assumable talking about the celestial spirit, or God. I enjoyed the way in which Shelley uses his words to flow evenly throughout the poem. I really like the lines “In the golden lightning/ Of the sunken sun,/ O’er which clouds are bright’ning,/ Thou dost float and run,/ Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun” (402). Shelley does a wonderful job in describing where the Sky-Lark is coming from. The clouds that brighten is where the sky-lark is arriving from and describes the way it is coming down, “Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun” (402). This simile helps illustrate the image very well in that you can imagine what a person looks like before a race begins. He continuously writes as if he is talking to a god-like figure and every aspect of its life is great and he wants to try to be close to it and learn from it. Even though “we mortals” (403) or humans dream of this being, we will never truly understand how it works. One problem that Shelley points out that we have certain feelings that the sky-lark doesn’t have like annoyance and pain. However, he also states that we need these feelings to truly understand the joy of the sky-lark (404).