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The Caged Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Caged Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins
poemanalysis.com/the-caged-skylark-by-gerard-manley-hopkins-poem-analysis/
Dharmender April 9,
Kumar 2017
In the sonnet, The Caged Skylark, Hopkins makes an elaborate comparison between the
human spirit and a skylark. There are two stages of this comparison: in the octave the
human spirit of a living human being is compared to a caged skylark; in the sestet the
human spirit of the same human being, when resurrected after death, is compared to a free
skylark.
Before we start with the poem, let me tell you that the idea of the spirit being a prisoner in
the body was a familiar one during the Renaissance. In John Webster’s play, The Duchess of
Malfi, there is a passage with which the octave of this sonnet shows a striking similarity:
“Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage? Such is the soul in the body: this world is like her little
turf of grass, and the heaven over our heads, like her looking-glass, only gives us a
miserable knowledge of the small compass of our prison.”
Besides, this poem is also said to be personal allegory of Hopkins’s life which was restricted
and cramped by his routine duties and by the constant frustration of his creative impulse.
The religious life to which he had dedicated himself placed a great mental strain upon him.
He never wavered in his devotion, but he had to pay heavily for it. He suffered terrible fits of
depression and the torments of self-disgust which came upon him from time to time.
All this is reflected in the following lines in the present poem: “This in drudgery, day-
labouring-out life’s age./ Yet both droop deadly sometimes in their cells/Or wring their
barriers in bursts of fear or rage.”
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The Caged Skylark Analysis
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Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest —
Why, hear him, hear him babble & drop down to his nest,
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