1) Where is the glow-worm and what special about it?
2) What happens to the earth and the moon when the skylark sings?
3) How are our songs different from those of the bird.
Chapter of Ode to skylark.
Answers
Ok
1.The glow worm population is a unique and special part of our ecosystem.
2.The speaker, addressing a skylark, says that it is a “blithe Spirit” rather than a bird, for its song comes from Heaven, and from its full heart pours “profuse strains of unpremeditated art.” The skylark flies higher and higher, “like a cloud of fire” in the blue sky, singing as it flies. In the “golden lightning” of the sun, it floats and runs, like “an unbodied joy.” As the skylark flies higher and higher, the speaker loses sight of it, but is still able to hear its “shrill delight,” which comes down as keenly as moonbeams in the “white dawn,” which can be felt even when they are not seen. The earth and air ring with the skylark’s voice, just as Heaven overflows with moonbeams when the moon shines out from behind “a lonely cloud.”
3.The speaker opens the poem by calling the skylark a "blithe Spirit," and spends a great deal of the poem describing the pure happiness that the bird's songs express.
The thirteenth and fourteenth stanzas specifically compare the bird's songs to our human songs, emphasizing how ours aren't as happy:
Teach us, Sprite or Bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.
Chorus Hymeneal,
Or triumphal chant,
Match'd with thine would be all
But an empty vaunt,
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.
Above, in the thirteenth stanza, the speaker is asking the bird what it is he thinks about that makes him sing so happily. Although we humans might sing pretty happily about love or about wine, the speaker explains, we still don't end up with songs that are so full of "rapture" (meaning intense delight or enthusiasm) like the skylark's are. And in the fourteenth stanza (also quoted above) the speaker continues the comparison, saying that even our wedding songs ("Chorus Hymeneal") or our chants of victory seem like just empty bragging in comparison to the skylark's pure, happy songs.
This means that we think about the past and the future, and we wish for whatever we don't have, and because of that, even when we laugh we're still experiencing some kind of sadness. So, those mixed emotions come out in our songs, making even our happy songs pretty sad.
Finally, the speaker decides that if the skylark could share what he's so happy about, then we humans could sing songs of our own that are so joyful that they command attention, like the skylark's songs do.