Welcome back to The Daily Poem here on the Close Reeds Podcast Network. I'm David Kern.

Today's poem is by Percy Bish Shelley, who lived from 1792 to 1822.

He was only 29 years old when he died, and he was one of the major English romantic poets, part of a circle

of poets that included Byron and Keats, Thomas Love, Peacock, and of course Shelley's own wife,

Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. He is best known for poems like Osamandias, Ode to the West

Wind, and several other poems, including the poems that I'm going to read today,

which is called To a Skylark. It's a little bit long, so I'm going to get right to it. This is

To a Skylark by Shelley. Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert, that from heaven

or near it, poureth 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.

In the golden lightning of the sun, or which clouds are

brightening, thou dost float and run, like an unbodied joy whose race has just begun.

The pale, purple even melts around thy flight, like a star of heaven in the broad daylight

thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy

shrill delight. Keen as are the arrows of that silver sphere whose intense lamp narrows in the white

dawn clear, until we hardly see, we feel that it is there. All the earth and air with thy voice is loud,

as when night is bare from one lonely cloud the moon rains out her beams,

and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art, we know not.

What is most like thee?

From rainbow clouds there flow not drop so bright to see as from thy presence showers a rain

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