Other poems produced by Shelley around the annus mirabilis in which most of Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci were written continue his quarrel with historical prescriptions of individual worth. His alternatives court madness, just as Beatrice's reconstruction of herself interfaced with incoherence and dysfunction. And madness is understood as a dissolution of self that, when it is a response to moral and political imperatives, revives a tradition of exemplary enthusiasm going back to Plato's dialogues, the Ion and Phaedrus. The skylark in Shelley's ‘To A Skylark’ (R&P 226–9) of June 1820 is perhaps his most famous figure for a discourse irresistibly beside itself:

The inchoate quality of the bird's song results from its untimeliness. Early on in the poem an image of anachrony elaborates the evaporation of the individual bird into a general significance:

The next stanza makes clear that Venus, planet of love, is the star in question. Out of its normal sphere, at the wrong time, the orientating power of bird and star is felt most deeply. This prepares for the analogy with the poet, an unbiddable character whose love expands our ordinary sense of connectedness and relation.

Obscured by his intimacy with illumination – ‘hidden / In the light of thought’ – the poet cuts a paradoxical figure, momentarily centre-stage in the explanation of the skylark. The difficulty for the reader lies in the typically overflowing quality of the bird's song whose generosity eventually escapes comparison. The reader is led from sympathy with unselfishness into a confrontation with the inordinate, the exorbitant, the daemonic.