The Lark Ascending

Siegfried Sassoon called it matchless of its kind, "a sustained lyric which never for a moment falls short of the effect aimed at, soars up and up with the song it imitates, and unites inspired spontaneity with a demonstration of effortless technical ingenuity... one has only to read the poem a few times to become aware of its perfection".

Meredith's poem The Lark Ascending (1881) is a hymn or paean to the skylark and his[2] song, written in rhyming tetrameter couplets in two long continuous sections.

It was then included in his volume Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, which first appeared in an unsatisfactory edition in June 1883, and a month later was reprinted by Macmillan at the author's expense in a second issue with corrections.

The poem describes how "the press of hurried notes" run repeating, changing, trilling and ringing, and bring to our inner being a song of mirth and light like a fountain piercing the "shining tops of day".

Consciously or unconsciously, Meredith's theme expands upon the sonnet False Poets and True by Thomas Hood (1799–1845), addressed to William Wordsworth,[4] and is of course in debt to Shelley's Ode To a Skylark.