Ans.  Percy Bysshe Shelley’s celebrated poem “To a Skylark” is abut a skylark, a miniscule bird that is famous for its song. In the poem, Shelley idealizes the bird and presents it as a unique creature. To Shelley, the skylark is an immortal being symbolizing illimitable beauty. Its music is perfect embodiment of beauty and joy and hence an endless source of inspiration for the poet. It is Shelley’s natural metaphor for pure poetic expression, the “harmonious madness” of pure inspiration. Thematically, the poem is about the power of nature to transform men’s lives, specifically through the medium of poetry.

In the broad daylight, the skylark, as it soars higher and higher, remains unseen, yet its song can still be heard, a song “unbodied joy” and “shrill delight”. Its song is “a flood of rapture so divine” that the poet cannot fully capture its essence. The joy expressed by the sky lark is beyond that which can be grasped by man, and the author speaks directly to the skylark in the latter stanzas, asking it to reveal to him the secret of its ethereal bliss so that he might then be able to share it with others through his words, and thus transform their lives.