April 15, 2025 • 14 mins
In this season, we’ve talked about the beauty of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ work, but he is also known for poems that plumb the depths of the human experience as well as its heights. Hopkins suffered from several chronic maladies, and there is a darker streak that runs through many of his poems, especially in those written toward the end of his short life when his own suffering and misery had reached a crescendo.
"The Caged Skylark" is one of these darker poems. It is a poem about the cage of the frailties and foibles of the human body and about the resurrection and new creation for which Hopkins longed.
Music from this episode was from EVOE, Beneath The Mountain, Okaya, Yehezkel Raz, Ardie Son, and Christopher Galovan. Sound design and editing is by Nate Sheppard.
For more poetry from the Rabbit Room, subscribe to our newsletter at Rabbitroompoetry.substack.com.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:02):
I'm Andy Patton and this is Rhyme and Reason from
the Rabbit Room. Each season we look at the life
and work of one poet, starting with Gerard Manley Hopkins.
(00:29):
In this season, we've talked a lot about the beauty
of Hopkins work. Many of his poems aim to capture
God's beauty in the particulars of creation and render it
in language. But Hopkins is also known for poems that
plumb the depths of the human experience as well as
its heights. There's a darker streak that runs through many
(01:00):
of his poems. It wasn't all flowers and rainbows, especially
in the poems written toward the end of his short life,
when his own suffering and misery reached a crescendo. These
darker poems, among them the group that sometimes called the
(01:22):
Terrible Sonnets, are not cynical or nihilistic, but rather they're
weighted with a sad and poignant wisdom that not everyone
can capture. And we wouldn't wish the kind of suffering
(01:45):
that Hopkins experienced on anyone. But anytime a great artist
experiences pain and then makes great art out of that pain,
it begs the question if he hadn't suffered. How would
his work have been different? Could he have written a
poem like the one we're about to read? Now here
(02:10):
is The Caged Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins. As a dare. Gail. Skylark.
Scanted in a dull cage. Man's mounting spirit. In his
bone house. Mean house dwells that bird. Beyond the remembering
of his free fells. This in drudgery day. Laboring out
(02:33):
life's age. Though aloft on turf or perch or poor
low stage. Both sing sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells. Yet
both droop deadly sometimes in their cells. Or ring their
barriers in bursts of fear or rage. Not that the
(02:57):
sweet foul song foul needs no rest. Why hear him
hear him babble and 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 unencumbered. Meadow
down is not distressed for a rainbow footing it. Nor
(03:20):
he for his bones risen. Hopkins did not lead what
anyone would call an easy life. In his biography of Hopkins,
Paul Mariani writes that he suffered from a handful of
chronic maladies, including head colds, headaches, bleeding, hemorrhoids, depression and diarrhea,
(03:47):
possibly due to an undiagnosed case of what today we
might call Crohn's disease. One of his Jesuit colleagues told
of the time he walked in on Hopkins grading papers
at 3 a.m. and sobbing uncontrollably with his head wrapped
in wet towels because he was in so much pain.
(04:10):
Margaret Ellsberg notes that Hopkins is remembered for being delicate
and high strung and frail. He hated teaching and loathed
giving sermons. He seemed to have no gift for pastoral work.
Yet his last handful of years were spent at a
teaching post in Dublin, and it was in Dublin that
his life went from challenging but marked by both suffering
(04:34):
and joy, to bleak to the point of madness. During
this time, he was responsible for setting and grading six
examinations a year for his students, each with hundreds of candidates,
and that task was made even more difficult by his
(04:55):
own unrelenting perfectionism. He took painstaking care and labored over
the fine details of the grades to the point of exhaustion.
He described himself as drowning in all the grading. Yet
despite his hard work, he was apparently an unpopular teacher
whose students rarely came to his classes. And yet, it
(05:18):
was in the midst of this difficult time that he
wrote some of his most abiding poetry. The so-called terrible sonnets.
Ellsberg writes of his last years that, quote, the much
discussed conflict between Hopkins natural character as a connoisseur of
(05:41):
beauty and his career as a slum dwelling, scrupulously obedient
servant of his insensitive superiors, came home to roost in
the last five years in Dublin. He was often and
then fatally sick, responding to God not in nature but
in his own personal desolation. The sonnets of these Dublin
(06:02):
years provide impeccably managed and edited examples of mature poetic genius.
Let's talk about our poem. A Caged Skylark. As the
title indicates, the poem focuses on a bird in a cage. Yet,
like so many of Hopkins's poems, there's a larger significance
(06:24):
to be found in the concrete details and images. A
caged skylark isn't about a caged skylark. It's about the
cage of the frailties and foibles of the human body,
and about the resurrection and about the new creation. Let's
unpack that idea a little bit, and walk through the
(06:46):
lines of the poem to see how the images are,
giving rise to the larger questions the poem is asking
and the even larger answers it's supplying. The poem begins
with a skylark in a cage. Yet a comparison is
being made. The bird is like, quote, man's mounting spirit
(07:10):
in his bone house. So the body is the cage
in the comparison that keeps the spirit from mounting to
the sky like a bird. And Hopkins carries the comparison further.
The bird has been so long in the cage that
it no longer remembers its days of free flying. Likewise,
(07:33):
this body day labors out its days in drudgery. Then,
Hopkins writes, though aloft on turf or perch or poor
low stage, both sing sings sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells.
So Hopkins is working with these dual images. Even birds
(07:55):
in cages give us beautiful birdsong. And even humanity laboring
in drudgery can wring beauty in wonder and beauty in work,
despite the mean bone house of the body that shackles
them in. Which is a pretty desperate and damning assessment
(08:19):
of human work and the suffering the body sometimes brings us.
We can make beauty, we can sing the sweetest spells.
But even so, to quote the poem again, like a
caged bird, we still sometimes fling our bodies against their
barriers in bursts of fear or rage. At the turn
(08:46):
of the poem, Hopkins brings in another comparison a Freebird.
This is where you get the lines. Not that the
sweet foul sung foul needs no rest. Why hear him
hear him babble and drop down to his nest? But
his own nest. Wild nest. No prison. So the free
(09:08):
bird and the caged bird are compared. And they both
make beautiful songs. And at the end of it, the
free bird drops down to his own nest, a wild
nest which is no prison. He isn't the caged skylark.
And then the final comparison of the poem comes in
the free bird is compared to humanity resurrected. But the
(09:36):
thing that humanity is freed from in the resurrection is
not the body, but the encumbrances of sin. Hopkins writes
in the poem, man's spirit will be flesh bound when
found at best, but unencumbered when his bones are risen.
So how do we interpret this? What sense do we
(09:59):
make of it? There's a sense in which a poem
is a work of art in itself. Viewed this way,
it is self-contained, and we don't need to speculate about
parallels between the life of the author of the poem
and the meanings contained in the poem. And that is
a valid level at which to engage with a poem
or any work of art. But if we stop at
(10:20):
that level, there are often layers of meaning in the
work that still remain untapped and unseen. As we've said before,
a growing understanding of Hopkins life sheds light on his work,
and it works the other way, too. A growing understanding
of his poetry can shed light on themes in his life,
(10:45):
and I think that dynamic is in play with this poem, too.
Hopkins is talking about birds, but he is also talking
about life. His life. By the end of the poem,
you can almost hear his longing for the resurrection, rising
out of long years of personal suffering and hardship and failure.
(11:12):
In the poem, he draws our attention to the free
bird and contrasts it with the caged bird and says, yes,
the free bird still needs rest, but it is free.
It is at peace, and you can almost hear him asking,
when will I be free? When will I be at peace?
And the answer he gives is in the new creation,
(11:34):
on the far side of the resurrection, when he will
still be flesh bound, but will be free to sing
the sweetest spells without ringing himself against the bars of
his cage in bursts of fear or rage. Now, with
(12:01):
all that in mind, here is the caged skylark again.
As a dear gale. Skylark. Scanted in a dull cage.
Man's mounting spirit. In his bone house. Mean house dwells
that bird beyond the remembering of his free fells. This
(12:25):
in drudgery day labouring out life's age. Though aloft on
turf or perch or poor low stage. Both sing sometimes
the sweetest, sweetest spells Bells, yet both droop deadly sometimes
in their cells, or ring their barriers and bursts of
fear or rage. Not that the sweet foul song foul.
(12:49):
Needs no rest. Why hear him? Hear him babble and
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 unencumbered. Meadow down is not distressed for
a rainbow footing it. Nor he for his bones risen. Ding!
S2 (13:27):
The music from this episode was from. And it was
you by. Beneath the mountain. Clear view by. Oka.
S1 (13:34):
Continuance.
S2 (13:36):
Continuance.
S1 (13:37):
Continuance.
S2 (13:38):
Continuance.
S1 (13:40):
Continuance.
S2 (13:41):
Continued.
S1 (13:44):
By Yehezkel Raz. That's a hard.
S2 (13:46):
One. By his cows. Raz. Okay, particles. My oldest son.
One would be worked.
S3 (13:53):
By Christopher Galvan.
S2 (13:54):
By Christopher.
S3 (13:57):
Gallivan.
S2 (13:58):
Gallivan. This sound design and editing is by Nate Shepard.
You can get more poetry from the rabbit room.
S3 (14:06):
By subscribing to our newsletter.
S2 (14:09):
Mm.
S3 (14:10):
Mm.
S2 (14:11):
Dada. Yeah. Can we listen to them?
S3 (14:13):
Sure.
S2 (14:14):
Yay!
I'm Andy Patton and this is Rhyme and Reason from
the Rabbit Room. Each season we look at the life
and work of one poet, starting with Gerard Manley Hopkins.
(00:29):
In this season, we've talked a lot about the beauty
of Hopkins work. Many of his poems aim to capture
God's beauty in the particulars of creation and render it
in language. But Hopkins is also known for poems that
plumb the depths of the human experience as well as
its heights. There's a darker streak that runs through many
(01:00):
of his poems. It wasn't all flowers and rainbows, especially
in the poems written toward the end of his short life,
when his own suffering and misery reached a crescendo. These
darker poems, among them the group that sometimes called the
(01:22):
Terrible Sonnets, are not cynical or nihilistic, but rather they're
weighted with a sad and poignant wisdom that not everyone
can capture. And we wouldn't wish the kind of suffering
(01:45):
that Hopkins experienced on anyone. But anytime a great artist
experiences pain and then makes great art out of that pain,
it begs the question if he hadn't suffered. How would
his work have been different? Could he have written a
poem like the one we're about to read? Now here
(02:10):
is The Caged Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins. As a dare. Gail. Skylark.
Scanted in a dull cage. Man's mounting spirit. In his
bone house. Mean house dwells that bird. Beyond the remembering
of his free fells. This in drudgery day. Laboring out
(02:33):
life's age. Though aloft on turf or perch or poor
low stage. Both sing sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells. Yet
both droop deadly sometimes in their cells. Or ring their
barriers in bursts of fear or rage. Not that the
(02:57):
sweet foul song foul needs no rest. Why hear him
hear him babble and 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 unencumbered. Meadow
down is not distressed for a rainbow footing it. Nor
(03:20):
he for his bones risen. Hopkins did not lead what
anyone would call an easy life. In his biography of Hopkins,
Paul Mariani writes that he suffered from a handful of
chronic maladies, including head colds, headaches, bleeding, hemorrhoids, depression and diarrhea,
(03:47):
possibly due to an undiagnosed case of what today we
might call Crohn's disease. One of his Jesuit colleagues told
of the time he walked in on Hopkins grading papers
at 3 a.m. and sobbing uncontrollably with his head wrapped
in wet towels because he was in so much pain.
(04:10):
Margaret Ellsberg notes that Hopkins is remembered for being delicate
and high strung and frail. He hated teaching and loathed
giving sermons. He seemed to have no gift for pastoral work.
Yet his last handful of years were spent at a
teaching post in Dublin, and it was in Dublin that
his life went from challenging but marked by both suffering
(04:34):
and joy, to bleak to the point of madness. During
this time, he was responsible for setting and grading six
examinations a year for his students, each with hundreds of candidates,
and that task was made even more difficult by his
(04:55):
own unrelenting perfectionism. He took painstaking care and labored over
the fine details of the grades to the point of exhaustion.
He described himself as drowning in all the grading. Yet
despite his hard work, he was apparently an unpopular teacher
whose students rarely came to his classes. And yet, it
(05:18):
was in the midst of this difficult time that he
wrote some of his most abiding poetry. The so-called terrible sonnets.
Ellsberg writes of his last years that, quote, the much
discussed conflict between Hopkins natural character as a connoisseur of
(05:41):
beauty and his career as a slum dwelling, scrupulously obedient
servant of his insensitive superiors, came home to roost in
the last five years in Dublin. He was often and
then fatally sick, responding to God not in nature but
in his own personal desolation. The sonnets of these Dublin
(06:02):
years provide impeccably managed and edited examples of mature poetic genius.
Let's talk about our poem. A Caged Skylark. As the
title indicates, the poem focuses on a bird in a cage. Yet,
like so many of Hopkins's poems, there's a larger significance
(06:24):
to be found in the concrete details and images. A
caged skylark isn't about a caged skylark. It's about the
cage of the frailties and foibles of the human body,
and about the resurrection and about the new creation. Let's
unpack that idea a little bit, and walk through the
(06:46):
lines of the poem to see how the images are,
giving rise to the larger questions the poem is asking
and the even larger answers it's supplying. The poem begins
with a skylark in a cage. Yet a comparison is
being made. The bird is like, quote, man's mounting spirit
(07:10):
in his bone house. So the body is the cage
in the comparison that keeps the spirit from mounting to
the sky like a bird. And Hopkins carries the comparison further.
The bird has been so long in the cage that
it no longer remembers its days of free flying. Likewise,
(07:33):
this body day labors out its days in drudgery. Then,
Hopkins writes, though aloft on turf or perch or poor
low stage, both sing sings sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells.
So Hopkins is working with these dual images. Even birds
(07:55):
in cages give us beautiful birdsong. And even humanity laboring
in drudgery can wring beauty in wonder and beauty in work,
despite the mean bone house of the body that shackles
them in. Which is a pretty desperate and damning assessment
(08:19):
of human work and the suffering the body sometimes brings us.
We can make beauty, we can sing the sweetest spells.
But even so, to quote the poem again, like a
caged bird, we still sometimes fling our bodies against their
barriers in bursts of fear or rage. At the turn
(08:46):
of the poem, Hopkins brings in another comparison a Freebird.
This is where you get the lines. Not that the
sweet foul sung foul needs no rest. Why hear him
hear him babble and drop down to his nest? But
his own nest. Wild nest. No prison. So the free
(09:08):
bird and the caged bird are compared. And they both
make beautiful songs. And at the end of it, the
free bird drops down to his own nest, a wild
nest which is no prison. He isn't the caged skylark.
And then the final comparison of the poem comes in
the free bird is compared to humanity resurrected. But the
(09:36):
thing that humanity is freed from in the resurrection is
not the body, but the encumbrances of sin. Hopkins writes
in the poem, man's spirit will be flesh bound when
found at best, but unencumbered when his bones are risen.
So how do we interpret this? What sense do we
(09:59):
make of it? There's a sense in which a poem
is a work of art in itself. Viewed this way,
it is self-contained, and we don't need to speculate about
parallels between the life of the author of the poem
and the meanings contained in the poem. And that is
a valid level at which to engage with a poem
or any work of art. But if we stop at
(10:20):
that level, there are often layers of meaning in the
work that still remain untapped and unseen. As we've said before,
a growing understanding of Hopkins life sheds light on his work,
and it works the other way, too. A growing understanding
of his poetry can shed light on themes in his life,
(10:45):
and I think that dynamic is in play with this poem, too.
Hopkins is talking about birds, but he is also talking
about life. His life. By the end of the poem,
you can almost hear his longing for the resurrection, rising
out of long years of personal suffering and hardship and failure.
(11:12):
In the poem, he draws our attention to the free
bird and contrasts it with the caged bird and says, yes,
the free bird still needs rest, but it is free.
It is at peace, and you can almost hear him asking,
when will I be free? When will I be at peace?
And the answer he gives is in the new creation,
(11:34):
on the far side of the resurrection, when he will
still be flesh bound, but will be free to sing
the sweetest spells without ringing himself against the bars of
his cage in bursts of fear or rage. Now, with
(12:01):
all that in mind, here is the caged skylark again.
As a dear gale. Skylark. Scanted in a dull cage.
Man's mounting spirit. In his bone house. Mean house dwells
that bird beyond the remembering of his free fells. This
(12:25):
in drudgery day labouring out life's age. Though aloft on
turf or perch or poor low stage. Both sing sometimes
the sweetest, sweetest spells Bells, yet both droop deadly sometimes
in their cells, or ring their barriers and bursts of
fear or rage. Not that the sweet foul song foul.
(12:49):
Needs no rest. Why hear him? Hear him babble and
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 unencumbered. Meadow down is not distressed for
a rainbow footing it. Nor he for his bones risen. Ding!
S2 (13:27):
The music from this episode was from. And it was
you by. Beneath the mountain. Clear view by. Oka.
S1 (13:34):
Continuance.
S2 (13:36):
Continuance.
S1 (13:37):
Continuance.
S2 (13:38):
Continuance.
S1 (13:40):
Continuance.
S2 (13:41):
Continued.
S1 (13:44):
By Yehezkel Raz. That's a hard.
S2 (13:46):
One. By his cows. Raz. Okay, particles. My oldest son.
One would be worked.
S3 (13:53):
By Christopher Galvan.
S2 (13:54):
By Christopher.
S3 (13:57):
Gallivan.
S2 (13:58):
Gallivan. This sound design and editing is by Nate Shepard.
You can get more poetry from the rabbit room.
S3 (14:06):
By subscribing to our newsletter.
S2 (14:09):
Mm.
S3 (14:10):
Mm.
S2 (14:11):
Dada. Yeah. Can we listen to them?
S3 (14:13):
Sure.
S2 (14:14):
Yay!
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