To A Skylark

Percy Bysshe Shelley completed the poem "To a Skylark" in late June, 1820, and forwarded it to London to be included among the verse accompanying Prometheus Unbound published by Charles and James Collier in London.

It was inspired by an evening walk in the country near Livorno, Italy, with Mary Shelley, and describes the appearance and song of a skylark they come upon. Mary Shelley described the event that inspired Shelley to write "To a Skylark": "In the Spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn. ... 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 poem uses a unique five line stanza with a three beat line except for the fifth line, which doubles the number beats of the other lines, and it has a rhyme scheme that is consistently 'ababb.'