In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark,” what does the poet call the skylark?

In Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark,” the poet calls the skylark a “blithe Spirit.”

The poem begins by addressing the bird as something unseen but unmistakably heard, rising above the earth while pouring out continuous song. “Blithe” means carefree or joyful, and the capitalized “Spirit” makes the skylark seem more than an ordinary animal: it becomes an emblem of pure, untroubled inspiration.

Shelley wrote the poem in 1820, probably in the countryside near Livorno, Italy. The skylark’s song leads him to compare earthly human experience with an ideal state of joy that people can imagine but never fully possess.

The bird is not given a personal name or a mythological identity. Readers sometimes remember the later comparisons to a poet, a maiden, a glow-worm, and a rose, but the poem’s opening epithet is the short phrase “blithe Spirit.”