Lit Aid

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Explanaton To a skylark ….Teach us, Sprite or Bird

By imrantosharit on April 5, 2025

(c)Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Ans. The lines have been taken from the beautiful lyric “To a Skylark” by the great Romantic poet P. B. Shelley. Here the poet gives vent to his feelings and thoughts roused in him by the bird’s joyous song.

The poet, living amidst the fever and fret, oppression in this distressed world cannot call the Skylark a bird, rather he identifies the bird as a spirit for he finds no other living thing that could resemble the bird mostly in its spontaneity, in its outpouring such joyous and all pervading song. So, as in the first stanza “a blithe spirit”, he calls the bird a spirit. Whatever the lark be, bird or spirit, the poet is eager to learn what his thoughts are, the thoughts that inspire the bird to sing such joyous songs. The music produced by the Skylark is full of rapturous joy which seems to have a divine quality. Love and wine are regarded as sources of inspiration to poets. But even these can not inspire him to sing like the lark. The poet says, never have songs sung in praise of love or wine spared a poet to such ethereal delight on the rapturous song of the Skylark. The bird’s harmony is “a flood of rapture divine”—it is pure, clear and spontaneous.

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