Ministry of higher education, science and innovation republic of uzbekistan

5. ‘To a Skylark’.
Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest …
Shelley completed this, one of his most famous poems, in June 1820. The inspiration for the poem was an evening walk Shelley took with his wife, Mary, in Livorno, in north-west Italy. Mary later described the circumstances that gave rise to the poem: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark.’ The opening line of the poem gave Noel Coward the title for his play Blithe Spirit.
Shelley’s poem is as much about poetic inspiration as it is about the bird itself. As so often with Romantic poetry, the self of the poet, the stuff of poetic creativity, the individual soul of the artist, is at one with nature’s awe-inspiring beauty and majesty.
6. ‘The flower that smiles today’.
The flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow dies;
All that we wish to stay
Tempts and then flies.
What is this world’s delight?
Lightning that mocks the night,
Brief even as bright …
So begins this poem, sometimes titled ‘Mutability’ (though Shelley, confusingly, wrote another poem called ‘Mutability’), which is one of Shelley’s most widely anthologised poems and a classic example of the carpe diem or ‘seize the day’ poem.
7. ‘Ode to the West Wind’.
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,
Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes …
Written in 1819 during a turbulent time in English history – the Peterloo Massacre, which Shelley also wrote about in his poem ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, deeply affected the poet – this classic ode is one of Shelley’s best-known poems. The west wind is the wind that would carry Shelley back from Florence (where he was living at the time) to England, where he wanted to help fight for reform and revolution. The west wind thus becomes, before Harold Macmillan, a ‘wind of change’.