If I were a dead leaf

Though the parallels may be more readily apparent between Shelley and Keats in To a Skylark, I find this line especially in its desire to mirror Keats Ode to a Nightingale. Both poets fixated on an element of natural phenomena, whether it be the sublimity of a birdsong or the pure power a wind possesses in altering the seasons, wish to incorporate themselves more fully in the process. Perhaps incorporate may be somewhat of an understatement, yet both poets strive to themselves embody such higher laws they see in nature. A far cry from Wordsworthian nostalgia and obsession with a nature only after the fact, and only in the mind’s of men crystallized, these poets seek for perhaps a more direct commune, an invocation of sorts. Shelley says “If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear; If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee” seeking a total immersion in the process, similarly to Keats and his wish to the Nightingale of a "Draught of vintage…With beadede bubbles winking at the brim,…That I might drink, and leave the world unseen”.

Man and his relations with nature have in fact evolved where one seeks the untamed, wild qualities of the other, wishing to be submerged in a kind of chaos and divine wisdom. Is it power hunger? I think not, for both poets seem simply to look for nature not as an entity to be conquered but instead in a kind of inspiration. And finally I would like to point out a final allusion to Wordsworth as his ideal relation between man and nature has not been totally discarded in these two poets, yet instead built upon. Near the end of his ode, Shelley says of the wind and its wonder: “The tumult of thy mighty harmonies/ Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, / Sweet though in sadness” (lines) perhaps paralleling Wordsworth’s “the still, sad music of humanity”(lines). Both poets finding embodiments of human melancholy in nature.