ABSTRACT
Published as one of the Miscellaneous Poems in 1820. Mary described what she regarded as the encounter that generated S.’s tribute to the sky-lark in her Note on Poems Written in 1820 (1839 iv 50):
In the spring we spent a week or two near Leghorn, borrowing the house of some friends, who were absent on a journey to England. — 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 sky-lark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.
Rather than the ‘week or two’ that Mary recalled, the Shelleys’ stay in Casa Ricci, John and Maria Gisborne’s house in Leghorn (Livorno), extended from 15 June to 4 August 1820. It was from Leghorn that S. posted to Peacock on 12 July (L ii 213–14) what must have been the final two titles for the Miscellaneous Poems section of 1820: one of these was certainly OL (see headnote to no. 322, Longman iii 378–85), the other almost certainly To a Sky-Lark. Newman Ivey White argued in SP xxxvi (1939) that ‘“Ode to a Skylark” [sic] was inspired on June 22, 1820, and written either then or shortly afterwards’ (528). The available evidence supports his conclusion. The principal co-ordinates for determining a date are the letter to Peacock of 12 July and the notation ‘Walk to the sea’ in Mary Jnl for 22 June. (She does not say that S. accompanied her on this walk or on either of the two others that she records (14 and 30 July) during the stay in Casa Ricci: Mary Jnl i 323–7.) White notes significant details — myrtle shrubs, skylarks, proximity to the sea, a recollection of S. — in an entry in John Gisborne’s journal for 20 October 1827 which describes a walk the Gisbornes took during a return visit to Leghorn. These strongly suggest that in her journal entry and her note in 1839 Mary is remembering a walk over some at least of the same ground. The evening setting that S. evokes in ll. 11–20 and the glow-worm of ll. 46–50 find echoes in her note as well. Claire Clairmont also records evening walks (accompanied by S.) on 25 June, 7, 11, and 13 July (Claire Jnl 151–5). As S. was occupied with his translation of the Homeric Hymn to Mercury in the first half of July (headnote to no. 336, Longman iii 508–10), it appears most likely that he composed To a Sky-Lark in the period from late June through the first few days of the next month. The location of the surviving portions of the draft in Nbk 14, between those for OL (May — June) and for WA (August), offers further corroboration of White’s dating, as Carlene Adamson points out (BSM v p. xxxix).