Blithe

 

Percy Bushe Shelly’s inspired poem, To a Skylark begins with the line, “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!” which inspired the title of Noel Coward’s inspired dark comedy, Blithe Spirit, thus demonstrating that inspiration often comes from inspiration, especially when that inspiration is inspired by time spent among the inspirational glories of nature.

The internet tells us that the poet and his wife, Mary Shelly, (author of Frankenstein; or A Modern Prometheus, and daughter of the early feminist philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft) were wandering among the lanes in Livorno, Italy one summer evening and heard the caroling of a skylark.  

The poet puts it like this:

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 sunken sun,

O'er which clouds are bright'ning,

Thou dost float and run;

Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

Pretty good stuff to be sure, but one has to wonder how much more lyrical old Percy would have been able to be had he and the missus had bicycles to ride that night, especially were they pedaling not around the hedges and bowers of a port city in Tuscany, but rather, through the industrial core of a port city in the Pacific Northwest with that warm spring light lingering late and making shadows grow long.

In that event, he might have waxed rhapsodic over the way the sun sank to a perfect point behind the Olympic peninsula with the skyline of Seattle in the foreground and he could have directed his apostrophe not to a skylark, but perhaps towards a seagull, whose crepuscular cries may not inspire such pathos as those of the genus Alauda, but which nevertheless offer a perfect accompaniment to the view.

Bring it home, Perce:

Such harmonious madness

From my lips would flow

The world should listen then, as I am listening now.