Hello! I am divya parmar. Hera I am writing blog on William Wordsworth's poem 'To the skylark' William Wordsworth was the great figure among the romentic posts. In these blog firstly I discribe Wordsworth very briefly and after that I discuss about the poem.
Before discuss about poem, let's discuss about the poet.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH'S LIFE:
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798). The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland, (now in Cumbria), part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake District. William's sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was captain, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Wordsworth's father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. He was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant from him until his death in 1783. However, he did encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit large portions of verse to memory, including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. William was also allowed to use his father's library.
William also spent time at his mother's parents' house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed to the moors, but did not get along with his grandparents or his uncle, who also lived there. His hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.
Wordsworth was taught to read by his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families, where he was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who later became his wife.
After the death of Wordsworth's mother, in 1778, his father sent him to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire (now in Cumbria) and sent Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire. She and William did not meet again for nine years.
Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge. He received his BA degree in 1791. He returned to Hawkshead for the first two summers of his time at Cambridge, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.
TO THE SKYLARK BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH:
Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky!
Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound?
Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye
Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
Thy nest which thou canst drop into at will,
Those quivering wings composed, that music still!
Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;
A privacy of glorious light is thine;
Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood
Of harmony, with instinct more divine;
Type of the wise who soar, but never roam;
True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!
‘To a Skylark’ is an ode to the songbird, skylark. In this poem, the poet praises certain qualities of the skylark which are unique to it. And he praises its nature.The setting of the poem is the wide sky. Though there are instances when the earth is mentioned, most of the poem takes place in the sky. After all, ‘sky’ is there in the name of the bird the poem is about.
Stanza: The poem is made of two stanzas of six lines each.
Rhyme: The poem follows the rhyme scheme ABABCC. The last words of the first and third lines, of second and fourth lines, and the fifth and sixth lines, rhyme with each other.
Imagery: There is some imagery in the poem. In the first stanza, we see a nest in a dew-covered ground. In the third stanza, we see the nightingale in a shady forest.
Personification: In line four of the second stanza, the skylark is said to thrill the bosom of the plain. Now plains do not have a bosom which only leads to the inference that the speaker personified the plain.
Oxymoron: There is an oxymoron, more of a contradiction in the second line of the third stanza. The skylark is said to have a privacy of glorious light, meaning it has privacy in the open sky.
The skylark is a daring songbird since it flies so high into the sky. There is a strong bond between him and his home. The songs he sings in the sky spread throughout the plains. He sings independently of the seasons. The speaker tells the skylark to leave the nightingale to her dark forest. He has all the glorious light to himself. He floods the land with his divine songs. He is wise that raises high but remains connected to his roots, remaining true to both the sky and the earth.
Words: 1045
Resources: Wikipedia, poetry.com
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