'Our Sweetest Songs Are Those That Tell Of Saddest Thought"

"We look before and after, 

And pine for what is not --

Our sincerest laughter

With some pain is fraught --

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." 

Shelley's "To a Sky-Lark" begs the reader to ask, can a poem merely be beautiful without possessing a deeper and potentially sadder meaning? Can something exist for the mere sake of existing? The speaker admires the sky-lark for appearing to have this pure quality to it, although he seems skeptical that it lacks any hidden agenda. The speaker asks the bird, “what objects are the fountains of thy happy strain?...or how could thy notes flow in such chrystal stream?” There appears to be a doubt that pure happiness and beauty can exist without pain. The fact that the bird sings, “when it is too high to be visible,” as the footnote states, gives the speaker a sense of the unattainable – a sense that this music is almost a surreal creation that can never actually be achieved.

“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.”

The speaker appears jealous of the skylark in this last stanza – begging it to teach him how to be purely glad, as if only then will the world read his poems. The poem seems to suggest that humanity contains too much sadness and therefore appreciates it in poetry: “our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” However, the speaker yearns for a simpler world where poetry does not have to contain this pain and he can merely exist with “clear keen joyance”