Sklark's Song

Poetry Foundation states on it's site that '“To a Skylark” suffers by comparison with Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”'

I find this statement odd because the two poems are undoubted masterpieces and while both are exercises in metaphor on avian tropes, Shelley's literary skylark is as equally reinvented as Keats's nightingale. The skylark is known and praised by Shelley for many things: the sweetness of it's song (fittingly the Skylark has a relatively long song to most birds) and it's ability to fly; however, Shelley's skylark isn't swooping back to the earth literally, but flies further and further away. The closes the skylark gets to earth is in Shelley's digression of similes, where first "Like a high-born maiden / In a palace tower" becomes "Like a glowworm golden". The skylark's only actual characteristics are obscured by Shelley, it's agency as a literal bird is robbed by Shelley who instead masks it's nature with figurative language. The self-invented skylark is an archetype befitting of Shelley, he muses himself and celebrates his own verse as a "harmonious madness," and acknowledges that he is the skylark and that asserts "the world should listen" to his poetry.