Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from Heaven, or near it,
Pourest 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.
— The first two stanzas of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” 1820. Learn more about Shelley and his work at our exhibition Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet, on view at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building through June.
