Classic Poem

The giddy lark reacheth the steepy air
By sweet degrees, making each note a stair.
Her voice leads softly on, the feathered strain
Follows, and leaves the last note to her train.
At the first stage she rests, seeming to tire;
Her wing mounts up her voice some eight notes higher.
At the next period in this airy hill,
Her rising voice lifts up her restive quill.
Hard tale to tell, when she her matins sings,
Whether her tongue gives, or receives her wings.
To the observing ear, attentive eye,
Her wings would seem to chant, her tongue to fly.
Brave flight of music, and a sublime song,
When wings thus sweetly fly into a tongue!
Throned on the welkin's crest, her voice the stair
Stills with her wings, and here becomes a chair:
Where seated, in a calm sweet strain she sings,
A loss to earth, without her tongue or wings.
She streams away in rapture, turnëd clear
Into a soft piece of harmonious air,
All sung into a jelly; now become
A nectar cloud, moved by a sphery tongue.
Lost to her self (poor bird!) as now to me
Who nothing but her air-strook voice might see.
But like a silver bell, that stands brim-full
Of its own sound, till the relenting pull
Shake off the pleasing trance: a broke note crossed
Put her marred wings in mind that she was lost.
Then (like the air that o'er the treble string
Trembleth its life away, soft hovering
Till by the base recalled) the liquid fowl
Strook solid, sings her body to her soul.
Lord! with what art she ruins in her fall,
As he that in division shuts up all:
Clad in a light held sarabrand, whose pace
Merrily winds her down to her first place.
Thus, as her body biggens, still her song
Draws near our sense, we understand her tongue.
But earth (as if resolved to interrupt
And rise amongst her numbers, now abrupt)
Gives her a dampy touch, that doth benumb
Her soul, and strikes her contemplation dumb.