Tuesday, November 8, 2011
A difference between Shelley and Clare (Shelley's "To A Skylark")
With Clare's Bird poems, the birds, themselves, are attributed with both animalistic and human characteristics as well as what seems to be the merging of the two but Shelley clearly displays his own subjective interpretation of the bird rather than giving it objective characteristics. Listening to the skylark, the bird sings "in profuse strains of premeditated art." Shelley is experiencing the bird song as art not as the bird is making art, which would be the bird doing rather than Shelley perceiving. All the descriptions of the skylark are from his point of view unlike Clare who is actively labeling the bird's physical attributes. Even when Shelley calls the bird joyous, it is more of an imagination because of how artful and beautiful its song is rather than stating it as fact. In this way, Shelley's "To a Skylark" endeavors in more poeticism than Clare's bird poems. Shelley numerously makes similes to how he sees the skylark like "a high-born maiden/in a palace tower,/ soothing her love laden." The greatest interest I have in this poem is how the skylark appears to Shelley with its extremely well-executed, imaginative, and beautiful descriptions. We see Shelley's vast imagination at work in "To A Skylark" and also a perspective that is accurate in its portrayal of individual imagination or perhaps the description of how one sees. We also get a consistent sense/tone of the joy Shelley experiences when within the skylark's grasp and as reader are given the joy that simple nature can transfer to us humans with its inherent artwork.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment