Teach me half the gladness

That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow,

The world should listen then as I am listening now.

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PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

HELPS TO STUDY

The skylark dwells in northern Europe and is unknown to most American boys and girls. From an English field you may often watch its flight higher and higher until it is lost to view. Many poets have written of the lark, but Shelley has found the words that seem best to express its flight and song.

1. Why is the lark called a spirit? 2. What words in the third stanza repeat this idea? 3. What is the silver sphere of the fifth stanza? 4. Explain the entire simile. 5. Explain the simile in the sixth stanza. 6. In the seventh stanza note how exquisitely the images of rainbow and rain are used to suggest the melody. 7. In the next four stanzas there are four comparisons with a poet, a maiden, a glow-worm, and a rose. Which do you like best? Why? 8. Which two comparisons are with sounds? which with light? which with odor? 9. With 1. 11, p. 260, what change in thought is suggested by the first word? 10. Give an example to illustrate the last line of this stanza. 11. In the last three stanzas, in what does Shelley think poetry inferior to the skylark? 12. Recall all the names that Shelley gives the skylark. 13. Which stanza do you like best? 14. Note all the words in the poem which suggest light; such as fire, lightning, sun, bright'ning, etc.

For Study with the Glossary: blithe, profuse, unpremeditated, unbodied joy, rapture, heavy-winged thieves, Hymeneal, scattering unbeholden, aërial hue, satiety.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Shelley's life (1792-1822) was animated by a desire to reform the world. He felt most profoundly the evils and tyrannies with which men were bound down, and he had the most ardent faith in the possibility of human nature attain5ing perfection. As a young man he buşied himself with schemes of reform to little effect, but in his poetry he inspired men by his dreams of a better world and a purified humanity.

Born in the early years of the French Revolution and 10 coming to manhood at the height of the Napoleonic wars, it was natural for Shelley to look upon the world as in a state of convulsion and to hope for some sudden dawn of a new and glorious epoch. Of his long poems, "Prometheus Unbound" is the best. It makes Prometheus, the Greek hero who 15 aided mankind against the tyranny of Zeus, become the type of the leader who is to free men from wrong and guide them to happiness under the rule of love. Both here and in many short poems Shelley expresses our aspirations and hopes in magnificent melodies.

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Love, beauty, freedom, and the disappointment which such an idealist must always find in actuality, are the themes of his exquisite lyrics. Often he turns from men to find in nature the symbols for the ideals to guide and solace, as in the poem "To a Skylark," or in "The Cloud" or "The West 25 Wind." Shelley's wonderful genius had no chance to develop into maturity, for he was drowned in 1822 while boating off the Italian coast near Pisa.

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TO AUTUMN

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;

To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook,

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

JOHN KEATS.

HELPS TO STUDY

In the first stanza, the words, mellow, fruitfulness, maturing, and ripeness give the key of the feeling. Note the verbs that add to the impression of plenty — load, bless, fill, swell, plump. What growing things are mentioned? What words suggest odors?

In the second stanza how is Autumn pictured? in what four places? In which place and form does Autumn make the most attractive picture? What words in the stanza suggest color?

What beautiful effect of coloring is suggested in the third stanza? Explain the third line; bloom is used in the sense of "make bloom." With what are the clouds streaked as by bars? What is the feeling expressed in this poem? Compare it with the feeling in Shelley's "Skylark"; in Byron's "Apostrophe."

Words and Phrases: fume of poppies. (Opium is made from poppies, whose bright red flowers are often to be seen in the grain fields.) Sallows, bourn, croft.

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