Poem of the Day: ‘The Caged Skylark’

The English Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins (1884–1889) wrote “The Caged Skylark” in 1877, the year of his ordination to the priesthood. This milestone marked the beginning of a thankless cycle of instability and drudgework, rotating through curacies and teaching positions in England and Ireland, which lasted the rest of his life. By any normal measure, he was a failure. The star scholar who had taken a first-class degree at Oxford flunked his final examination in theology, destroying any hope of a comfortable career with the Jesuits. The depression and ill health of his last years were exacerbated by the inhospitability of his teaching work in Dublin. Twelve years after ordination, weeks shy of his forty-fifth birthday, he was dead of typhoid fever. His dying words: “I am so happy.” On his conversion to Catholicism in 1868, Hopkins had renounced poetry altogether, but he might as well have resolved to fast from breathing. As the period of his priestly formation drew toward its close, his art took wing in a cycle of major spiritual sonnets: “The Windhover” and “God’s Grandeur,” as well as today’s Poem of the Day. All over these poems we find Hopkins’s singular stylistic fingerprints. His metrical scheme, which he called “sprung rhythm,” imagines a foot that begins with a stressed syllable, then expands and shrinks to make room for as many unstressed syllables as the poet needs. His diction, influenced by Old English, thickens his poetic line with kennings, as well as verbs and modifiers that riff on the idea of kenning: “dare-gale,” “bone-house,” “day-labouring-out.” In “The Caged Skylark,” as in “The Windhover,” a bird provides the central conceit. The skylark serves as a figure for the human soul, trapped in the dullness of its earthly life and longing for the freedom of its true home. The Caged Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage, Man’s mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells — That bird beyond the remembering his free fells; This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life’s age. Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells, Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage. Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest — Why, hear him, hear him babble & drop down to his nest, But his own nest, wild nest, no prison. Man’s spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best, But uncumberèd: meadow-down is not distressed For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen. ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘The Caged Skylark’

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