Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ and Thomas Hardy

The interpretation of poetry is certainly an intellectually demanding, and ultimately fulfilling task, and one of the means by which the scholar can approach the work of a great poet is when he/she encounters the work of a great precursor to which the latter poem is indebted, but one must bear in mind that the latter work, must be one in which there is an authentic voice. In this paper the endeavour is to investigate one such instance: the relationship between Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ (1820) and Thomas Hardy’s ‘Shelley’s Skylark’ (1901). The conjecture here is that Hardy’s poem is not one in which the mere influence of an earlier poem is predominant, but evinces an intentional irony. Furthermore, irony is manifested in Hardy’s poem not only in statement but also in form. After an introduction on the reception of Shelley’s poetry both in criticism and among poets, a close reading of both poems, and how they interact, follows.