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Still, Citizen Sparrow (Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition)

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The Poem

Like many other poems in English, some of them quite famous, Richard Wilbur’s “Still, Citizen Sparrow” takes as its subject, at least partially, a bird—in this case, a vulture. It does so, however, by addressing itself to another bird, a sparrow.

The use of the opening word, “Still,” suggests that the reader is entering the poem at a point where the speaker has already been talking to the sparrow, in a way presumably sympathetic to that bird’s belief that the vulture is an “unnatural” creature. This negative characterization is undoubtedly...

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