Shelley's prancy-but-glad “The skylark ascending” (1820) reduces the bird to Romantic adjunct in such oddly fastidious ways:
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 (1-5)


(…)


Like a glow-worm golden
In a dell of dew,
Scattering unbeholden
Its aerial hue
Among the flowers and grass which screen it from the view (46-50)


Leaving aside the fact that Shelley also compares the skylark with explicit simile to a poet, a maiden and a rose, what exactly is it that makes a “glow-worm” a sufficiently exalted vessel for the “blithe Spirit” but renders its own birdly self unsuitable? It may be simple as a Thomas Friedman-esque knack for muddled metaphor , but it has made Shelley, or more precisely “To a skylark”, a prize target for scholars associated with that collocation of critical interests and sympathies that has come to be called ecocriticism. Critics including Buell (1995) and Pinkney (1998) have excoriated “To a skylark” as “arrogant” and “exploitative” for using the bird as a “representative of the poet’s own inner aspirations” instead of “respecting it in its objectivity” (Pinkney 414).


And with a certain 19th-century vogue for the skylark as “representative of the poet’s own inner aspirations”, some of Shelley’s contemporaries offend similarly—for instance Wordsworth, whose own “To a skylark” (1805) addresses the “Drunken lark” (20) and comically manages to come off, in its raucous sentimentality, like one of those slurred bar exchanges, all “I’m not drunk! YOU’RE drunk! I can drive!” “Up with me! Up with me into the clouds” (1), Wordsworth begins, and continues in appealingly affectionate doggerel, like the last party guest to leave, with too many hugs and “I love you, man!”-style protestations:


Happy, happy Liver,
With a soul as strong as a mountain river
Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver,
Joy and jollity be with us both! (22-25)

So, ya know. Romantics gonna romant. ( )