Ans: Shelley’s “To a Skylark” is a celebrated romantic poem exhibiting the poet’s intense lyricism. In addition to the imaginative idealism, succession of splendid images, subjective treatment of nature, the poem is remarkable for its spontaneity. Shelley uses a variety of poetic devices in order to bring his idea home. However, the most important poetic device apart from some alliteration used in the poem is simile. The entire poem is built around a series of similes striking comparisons between the skylark and a host of other things primarily focused on the motifs of light and heat. The bird has been compared to a ‘cloud of fire’ that melts the evening around itself. It has been variously compared to a poet, a maiden atop her palace, a glow-worm and a rose embowered in its own green leaves. The importance of all these similes is to set in motion the dialectic between secrecy and disclosure in the poem. This relates to the unseen presence of the bird. The most essential point about all the similes is to draw attention to the absolute incomparability of the skylark. Shelley idealizes the bird and through these similes presents it as a mysterious spirit.
