11/8 - Shelley and Blake
Shelley's "To the Skylark" seemed pretty straightforward to me until the last couple of stanzas where he shifts from questioning the bird and envying it because as humans "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought" (90), to understanding that if humans could attain the mindset of the bird then it would make the bird's joy kind of obsolete. He says that if we could scorn all the negative emotions, like the bird seems to, then he knows "not how thy joy we ever should come near" (95), so I guess he could be trying to say that to truly appreciate joy, human's also must experience pain and sadness.
I saw some of that idea in Keat's "Ode on Indolence" when he talks about his indolence giving him a numbing feeling where "Pain had no sting, and pleasure's wreath no flower" (18), he's not subject to pain, but he also isn't feeling any joy. Based on his letter to George and Georgiana, Keat's was trying not to think about his friend's father dying, and so was trying to ignore love, ambition, and poetry because they would disrupt his goal of attaining disinterestedness (or a state unmotivated by self-interest) which I think connects with the line "A pet-lamb in a sentimental farce" (54).
I think both poems contain the idea that joy (and poetry) spring from pain, and maybe where Shelley is more hopeful about learning from the skylark ("Teach me half the gladness/ That thy brain must know" (101), Keat's is weary of learning it because he thinks "nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced" (pg 856) and he doesn't actually want the experience that will make his poetry authentic so he tells love, ambition, and poetry to leave him and never come back.
"Skylark" is definitely a deceptive poem, at least initially. Shelley uses imagery similar to Barbauld's "Summer Evening", evoking the sky and the heavenly bodies (in particular, Venus) in which to articulate the inarticulateness of the numinous skylark. But with line 80, "Thou lovest -- but ne'er knew love's sad satiety", the poem seems to veer in an unpredicted way. If I'm reading the poem correctly, Shelley seems to be arguing that mortals are not only incomparable to the skylark, but that they shouldn't yearn to be comparable. That pain and sadness, while not inherent in the skylark, are invaluable characteristics to us humans.
ReplyDeleteI also thought I had understood what "To the Skylark" was about. That being he has learned from the bird something about expression that he could not learn from all of his books or from looking at other poets. However, I can see that the bird is instead a metaphor for this childlike innocence in how a poet writes. The words he uses, "harmonious madness" makes me think this is more accurate as it could work in describing how a poem or any other piece of art is made without much thought or planning. Still, the descriptions Shelley uses in this poem is beautiful and is quick to trick us of its meaning.
ReplyDeleteLike many other people in class, I had originally thought Shelley's poem "To the skylark" was strait forward. The class discussion on Tuesday quickly showed me that it was not as simple as I originally thought. I think his fascination with the idea of "unpremeditated art" is interesting. While the I still think the commentary on what makes you a human being is there, the idea of unpremeditated art was a reading that I didn't see at first. I think your readings and the similarities between Shelley's poem and Keats poem is interesting. I agree that both poems seem to contain the idea that joy (and poetry) spring from pain.
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