Today, we look at Hopkins’s poem “The Caged Skylark” and examine what its vision of a caged bird has to say about the spirit and resurrection of man.

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.

In our last installment of Lewis’s “Main Street,” we witness Carol’s dramatic coming to terms with the nature of her struggle. In this conversation with a grizzled suffragette, she is able to finally understand herself and her struggle thoroughly enough to get past her distaste for Main Street. She even discovers something about love in the process. Fancy that!

Today we’re taking a look at Wallace Stevens’s thorny but brilliant 1934 poem. “Idea of Order” explores ideas of poetry, chaos and order, and the act of creation itself. Be warned: these are the sorts of poems that bear rereading!