[In the following essay, Daileader provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe.]

In the lush, wild terrain of John Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe, the few paths laid by critics are fraught with pitfalls. Scholars who have taken up this initially charming but ultimately unsettling poem about a girl, a dead sparrow, and a lascivious poet, have been hampered by two questions. Firstly, how many "voices" does the poem contain? Three decades ago, Stanley Fish laid the groundwork for interpreting the poem in terms of two voices: the voice of "innocence" embodied in the persona of Jane Scrope, and the voice of "experience" embodied in the persona of "Skelton, Poet Laureate," who breaks into the poem roughly halfway through, reminding us retroactively (and some might add, annoyingly) of his role in creating the child speaker of the sparrow's elegy.¹ Secondly, how are we to reconcile the religious and the erotic elements of the poem? The tension between these elements manifests itself not only in the apparently dichotomous first and second halves of the poem, but also in several corresponding dichotomies: the Catullan, phallic connotation of the "wanton" sparrow versus the biblical connotation of the sparrow whose fall is marked by God; Jane's apparent innocence versus her sensual delight at Phyllyp's provocative flutterings (and her perhaps naive references to sex); and Skelton's Marian language in the Commendacions versus their cupiditous overtones. Which of the foregoing elements should determine our approach to the work?

My answer to these questions is a resounding "all of the above," and I base this answer upon the text's collapsing of the artist/subject or creator/creature binarism. For Jane, like the speaker, is an artist herself: in her lament she recreates and re-presents Phyllyp, while Skelton as poet simultaneously represents her; the three figures thus reflect one another in endlessly complex, often paradoxical ways. And this triptych, in unhinging one zero sum, brings on the collapse of other binarisms: man/woman; human/ animal; sacred/profane; innocence/experience; redemption/ sin. Thus the poem's central symbol and namesake, the sparrow, embodies not either lust or mortality, but both; he is Jane in miniature and hence he is also Skelton in miniature; in short, he is humanity, with all the weaknesses that name implies—the frailty which requires protection, the sinfulness which requires forgiving, the death which requires salvation….

In the case of Phyllyp Sparowe we have, for the umpteenth time, a male poet depicting a female subject, and we have, in this essay, a female reader responding to her. As in any case of this sort, the feminist critic faces a "schizophrenic" task. First, she must take a more sympathetic approach to the female poetic subject, must never assume that we are getting "her side of the story"; that is the easy part, the part that comes, so to speak, naturally to women readers. Yet alongside this reflex, feminist critics must cultivate a counter-response which insists that the poetic "she" we may react to so viscerally, so empathetically, does not exist as such, that "she" is merely a creation of the male poet/poet-speaker, and hence reflects his own fantasies and biases—or rather, those of his culture. This last is particularly obvious in Phyllyp Sparowe, where the poet-speaker makes explicit his role in creating Jane:

Per me laurigerum
Britanum Skeltonida vatem
Hec cecinisse licet
Ficta sub imagine texta.

[I Skelton laureat, poet of Britain, have been permitted to sing this under an imaginary likeness.]

Although much criticism of the poem gestures toward the import of the above lines, few critics are willing to follow the passage to its fullest implications: that there is, technically, only one voice, that of the poet-speaker; that the poem does not consist of two diametrically opposed halves, one "Jane's" and one "Skelton's"; that questions regarding Jane's characteristics, her age, her maturity, her sexual "innocence" or lack thereof, are only relevant in light of why or why not "Skelton" would have us perceive such qualities in his heroine. And to be aware of these things is not to rule out a careful consideration of "Jane's" own experience, as the text presents it to us, for "Jane"—regardless of the poem's biographical resonances—had in Skelton's world and still has in our own real relevance to real women by virtue of the fact that readers want to make her real.

A feminist reading of Phyllyp Sparowe must therefore eschew the binarism of Fish's reading and look for connections rather than contrasts, elisions rather than interruptions, must look for places where the poet slips into his subject. One such moment occurs in the passage describing Jane's attempt to stitch an image of her lost sparrow, for her own "comfort" and "solace."

But whan I was sowing his beke,
Me thought my sparow did spek,
And opened his prety byll,
Saynge, 'Mayd, ye are in wyll
Agayne me for to kyll!
Ye prycke me in the head!'
With that my nedle waxed red,
Me thought, of Phyllyps blode.
Myne hear ryght upstode,
And was in suche a fray
My speche was taken away.
I kest downe that there was,
And sayd, 'Alas, alas,
How commeth this to pas?'
My fyngers, dead and colde,
Coude not my sampler holde;
My nedle and threde
I threwe away for drede.

Although we know that, in effect, Jane has been re-creating Phyllyp's image throughout her elegy, here we see her pick up a phallic instrument very like Skelton's stylus and attempt to sketch Phyllyp, as Skelton sketches Jane, on a blank text or rather textile (both from textare, to weave). The passage is so heavy with gender-play it is almost too good to be true: here Skelton reverses the familiar trope of male stylus and virgin female text, placing the phallic needle in female hands and gendering the text(ile) as male. The blood, of course, suggests some kind of sexual initiation for this "sparow whyte as mylke"; yet the gender reversal becomes muddled when we consider that the virginal blood "really" is Jane's, not Phyllyp's. What does this passage say, then, about the act of "representation" (this is Jane's surprisingly post-modern term)—and how is Skelton as an artist reflected in this crucial scene? Does Jane, in experiencing the frustrations and the (here, literal) pain of creativity parallel Skelton and his poet-persona? Or does her ultimate throwing aside of her needle/pen confirm her feminine ineptitude in the phallic act of creation? Do these lines thus reassert the poet/subject dichotomy?

In answering these questions, it may help to look at another moment when we are called upon to think of Jane as an artist—or as an aspiring artist, at least—and this is where she apologizes for her lack of poetic skill:

For as I tofore have sayd,
I am but a young mayd,
And can not in effect
My style as yet direct
With Englysh wordes elect….

Richard Halpern is one critic who cannot resist reading Jane's poetic "lack" in a Freudian light:

What Jane has, then, is matter—enough to 'fyll bougets and males'—but she cannot 'direct' her 'style'…. A bouget is a pouch, bag, or wallet; the word, related to bulge, comes from the Latin bulga, a leather bag or a womb. A male is also a leather bag or wallet, but the word lends itself to witty associations with the testicles. Jane thus bulges with the necessary matter for a poem but cannot 'direct' her 'style'…. She cannot direct her stylus … with its all-too-obvious symbolization….¹³

At this point Halpern's Freudian reading seems to reinforce the Skelton/Jane opposition posited above. Here, once again, Jane struggles to direct a phallic implement, to appropriate the male role of creator, with the consequence, however, of hurting herself. At this point Fish's male reader can smile upon Jane with "affection and condescension."¹⁴ To him it is no surprise that Jane slips up in her attempts to represent her beloved, and that when given the patriarchal stylus, she fumbles, pricks herself, bleeds. Having read Catullus, he knows that, after all, the sparrow is the phallus, and having read Freud, he knows that Jane is castrated, sparrow-less, helpless.

And yet Jane is not the only one who stumbles in the act of phallic creation. Here "Skelton" describes his own artistic impotence:

My pen it is unable,
My hand it is unstable,
My reson rude and dull
To prayse her at the full….

We may recognize here the "inexpressibility motit" ubiquitous in the genre, but I would argue that the emphasis on the unstable pen takes on a new significance in relation to Jane's artistic struggles. Halpern adds an unexpected twist to his own Freudian reading of the poem: he extends Jane's phallic "lack" to the poet-persona himself. For despite his attempt rhetorically to master his young subject, the poet's tone throughout the Commendacions is one of extreme "erotic submissiveness." Halpern argues:

'Skelton' unwittingly illustrates his shortcomings in his very first English phrase, when he promises to devote his 'hole imagination' to praising his mistress. If this persona organizes things into wholes, he also reduces them to holes…. The phallic organizer who pretends to totalize and complete the poem proves to be precisely the space of its 'hole' or lack.¹⁵

I would only modify Halpern's judgment to say that the poet-speaker is not the space of lack in the poem, but rather he demonstrates the lack which imbues the entire poem. As Halpern himself points out, "Phyllyp Sparowe is, in some sense, founded on the void, specifically that left by the disappearance of its namesake. Elegy is supremely the genre of lack…."¹⁶ What links Skelton and Jane is their mutual experience of lack, of separation from a beloved. Jane lacks Phyllyp, Skelton lacks Jane, and both attempt (with limited success) to fill this void by means of representation. It is the yearning in both "voices"—as Jane relives her time spent with Phyllyp, and as "Skelton" indulges in "fantasy" of the delights Jane will always withhold from him—that unifies the poem. I think it is not unreasonable to assume that many or most readers bring to the poem some experience of this bittersweet play of the imagination against the absence of a beloved. This is the key to the poem's poignancy.

Yet I would like to move away from "lack" in the Freudian sense. For the sparrow whose loss occasions the poem need not exclusively stand for the phallus. Beryl Rowland, in her extensive study of bird symbolism, documents the medieval literary tradition of the lecherous sparrow, but also points out an alternative vein of symbolism.

In general the Biblical sparrow was a very different breed from the bird which, according to Bartholomew the Englishman, was 'full hot … and lecherous.' 'Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?' said Christ. 'And one of them shall not fall on the ground, without your Father knoweth.' Under mosaic Law two sparrows were a purification offering…. St. Ambrose regarded the sparrows as the body and the soul, 'For both are lifted up to God by spiritual wings'…. 'Even the sparrow finds a home… where she may lay her young, at Thy altars, Ο Lord of Hosts!' cried the psalmist, (lxxxiv.3)¹⁷

It seems likely that Skelton, a clergyman, was as conscious of the biblical connotations of the sparrow as of the Catullan tradition: it is possible, in fact, that he intended both symbolic valences to play in the minds of his readers. And why need one choose? The biblical use of the sparrow highlights its delicacy, its humble size, in order to illustrate the pervasiveness of divine providence (a lesson that Jane might find comforting)—but there is no need to consider this sparrow "a very different breed" than Catullus' sparrow. Why should a lecherous sparrow, any more than a lecherous person, slip between the fingers of divine providence? Let us not forget that lechery is a sin only in humans, not in animals, who have neither reason with which to combat sin nor souls with which to be damned.¹⁸ When Chaucer describes his Summoner as "lecherous as a sparwe,"¹⁹ undoubtedly he means us to fault, if anyone, the man, not the bird.

Indeed, there is no denying that Phyllyp is (or was) as sexual as any bird. Perhaps the most startling and comic moment in Jane's elegy is her wish

That Phyllyp may fly
Above the starry sky,
To treade the prety wren
That is our Ladyes hen.
Amen, amen, amen!

The beautiful absurdity of this prayer lies in its naive conflation of animal doings with the afterlife of the human spirit. Jane does not seem to realize that, as intimated above, one might find neither wrens nor "treading" in heaven. But more importantly, these lines reveal Jane's delight in Phyllyp's sex-life, a sex-life she imagines she has shared with him by letting him under her clothes. And if some readers find these quasi-sexual references jarring within what otherwise seems a child's prattle, ultimately it is not inconceivable that a young girl coming of age in the isolation of a nunnery would seek entertainment in the mating of birds or in a make-believe romance with a sparrow. I would argue that it is only in retrospect, when we learn of the poet-speaker's presence throughout Jane's elegy, that her delight in Phyllyp's sexuality begins to look less than naive, and that Phyllyp's fluttering contact with her bosom takes on an intense eroticism. But I will come back to these issues. In any case, I feel that our over-riding impression of this bird is of his birdlike rather than his supposedly phallic qualities: like any other bird, he was small and feathered, and he spent his day singing and hunting for females or bugs. Like any other bird, he was prey to cats.

And ultimately, it all comes down to Phyllyp's death. The focus of the poem is Phyllyp's vulnerable and mortal nature—something he of course shares with human beings. I have already pointed out Jane's link to the sparrow as an object of love and a subject of poetry. Both girl and bird are adored, are described as "whyte as mylke"; another common quality is that of smallness, delicacy, vulnerability—something brought to light in the pinpricking scene discussed above. The Commendacions, in fact, foreground these features: the poet's doting eye traces not only Jane's ruby lips and white cheeks, but also a scar on her chin. Despite the poet's attempt to trope the scar into something celestial, this detail works against the overall deifying language of the Commendacions by pointing up the maiden's mortality, her susceptibility to wounding, bleeding, harm. The flower image Skelton reiterates in each refrain was a common symbol for mutability, for the frailty and transience of beautiful things; the poet's use of epithets like "smale" and "quickly veined," however conventional in this type of poetry, reinforce our sense of Jane as a tender little specimen. Thus we are apt to smile in charmed disbelief when the speaker declares:

Ther is no beest savage,
Ne no tyger so wood,
But she wolde chaunge his mood….

Another poetic convention? Certainly—but in light of the Jane-Phyllyp parallel we have been pondering, the reference to the tiger may work on more than one level. Can it be any accident that the speaker chooses a cat as the potential enemy that Jane's beauty (he claims) will vanquish? Were it not for the fact that Phyllyp—Jane's counterpart—has fallen prey to a cat; were it not for the scar on Jane's chin (a cat scratch?); were it not for Jane's smallness and delicacy, we might perhaps dismiss as mere embellishment the speaker's hyperbolic claim. But I read these lines as a subtle hint that Jane is in more peril than she knows—and not from imaginary tigers.

For there is one binarism whose undoing can be far more unsettling on a subliminal level than the collapsing of the erotic and the sacred (something which Kinney argues can be done without profanity): this is the human versus the bestial. For, in my reading-as-a-woman, something about the poem's animal imagery struck me as vaguely troubling. My unease began with Jane's use of the term "treading" to depict Phyllyp's animal love-making. Any Chaucerian, of course, would associate the term with our favorite barnyard Casanova, Chaunteclere. And a glance at the OED proves that the term was used to describe birds mating for as long as it was used to mean "to step upon" (both uses occur, in fact, in Phyllyp Sparowe: see 1149). Still, I cannot help but feel that the potential violence of the primary meaning is intrinsic to the secondary, as suggested by Jane's off-hand reference to Chaucer's ever-popular rooster:

Chaunteclere, our coke, …
With Partlot his hen,
Whom now and then
He plucketh by the hede
Whan he doth her trede.

I would hazard to guess that most women readers cannot help but flinch here on poor Partlot's behalf. Even if a male bird literally does "tread" or grab hold of the female's back with his claws during mating, one can hardly forget the sense in which "to tread" means "to step or walk with pressure on (something) esp. so as to crush, beat down, injure, or destroy it; to trample." And perhaps Skelton wishes both senses to play here. Clearly, the "treading" Chaucer depicts in the Nun 's Priest's Tale functions as a crucial factor in the tale's mock-romantic effect; the "treading" satirically comments on the essentially bestial act that the romance genre prettifies. The word is meant to be somewhat jarring, an unsettling reminder of the animal element in human sexuality.

Yet I would argue that Skelton's version of treading goes farther in its suggestions of violence than Chaucer's depiction of Chaunteclere's barnyard antics, and not only by adding the brutal pluck of the head. Viewing these lines in the context of the poem's other animal references brings to light a disturbing emphasis on the predatory. It is, after all, a predatory act which occasions the poem: Phyllyp falls prey to Gyb the cat, just as the fleas on Jane's skin fall prey to him, and just as the female birds fall prey, in a sexual sense, to the male birds in the poem. Placed within this predatory framework, the longing of the poet after Jane's physical person takes on a rather sinister aspect; his ocular absorption of her every bodily feature begins to resemble the mesmerized stare of the poised feline just before the fatal pounce. Perhaps it is this predatory view of sex which underlies Skelton's feminizing of the traditionally male tomcat Gyb—something critics have remarked upon but not, to my knowledge, accounted for.²⁰ Perhaps Gyb must be female in order to prey, sexually, on Phyllyp, a male.

This focus on the predatory provides, in part, an explanation for some of the discomfort inspired by the poem's sensuality. Why does it disturb readers when "Jane" describes Phyllyp's contact with her "naked skyn"? According to Fish, "It is perhaps difficult to read these lines without questioning her innocence"—but I protest that there is nothing at all un-childlike or worldly about the sensual thrill attributed to Jane here. Rather, what readers find unsettling is their voyeuristic participation in these scenes. I do agree with Fish's claim that "we must be continually aware of the distance between what Jane in her innocence would contend and what we would interpolate,"²¹ but I would add that his sophisticated reader must also contend with a suppressed sense of guilt at making these sexual interpolations in a child's elegy to a dead pet. And when the amorous poet-speaker interrupts Jane's narrative, this discomfort is raised to a pitch. Now we learn that all along there has been an invisible third party, a sophisticated older male, not only witnessing, but in fact orchestrating our less-than-innocent responses to this girl's private moments. As "Skelton" launches into his obsessive musings, and we wonder to what degree the poet has "planted" the sexual innuendo in Jane's narrative, we feel implicated in his moral universe. And it cannot assuage the reader's discomfort to realize that this moral universe equates human sexual urges with barnyard rutting.

Given Skelton's pointed use of animal imagery, there is a delightful irony in Alexander Pope's epithet of "beastly Skelton," as well as in Elizabeth Barret Browning's more laudatory description of the poet as "rabid … a wild beast in a forest…. In his wonderful dominion over language, he tears it, as with teeth and paws, ravenously, savagely; devastating rather than creating…. Mark him as a satyr of poets! fear him as the Juvenal of satyrs!"²² Yet, I have a hunch that Skelton would not have disputed this description. The three-way linkage of poet, maiden, and sparrow implicates the Skelton persona in base animal impulses. And Skelton the satirist may indeed have intended, in implicating his persona, to implicate all humankind.

Also, Browning's misuse of the term "satyr" strikes me as a fruitful and perhaps deliberate misuse. The OED provides a long heritage to the etymological and semantic confusion surrounding the terms "satyr" and "satire"—which in fact are not linguistically related. The satyr, a creature human to the waist and goat below (another reputedly lecherous animal),²³ embodies the human race at its basest, and reifies the philosophical commonplace most succinctly stated by Pope's "Essay on Man," which situates mankind "on this isthmus of a middle state" between God and beasts. It is therefore a happy semantic accident that the term "satyr" so closely resembles "satire," a genre that often deploys animal imagery in order to deflate human presumption. Browning, in dubbing Skelton "a satyr of poets," both lauds the poet's satirical wit, and conflates him with the universal target of satire. The satyr of satire mocks even himself.

Although I do not call Phyllyp Sparowe a satiric poem, I find subtly satirical its collapsing of human and animal sexuality. One is reminded of the bizarre landscapes of Hieronymous Bosch, filled with half-bird, half-human monsters and with the orgiastic intermingling of naked human bodies and animal and vegetable life forms. Of course from our post-modern secular perspective these pictorial dream-visions seem more psychedelic than moralistic, but contemporaries of Bosch were inclined to view his work as painterly sermonizing, as "a stern warning against the vice of Luxuria."²⁴ Either way, in light of these bizarre images and their melding of feathers and human flesh, Phyllyp's contact with Jane's virginal skin becomes even more sexually suggestive.

But perhaps this is to over-stress the negative uses of animal iconography. I do not read Phyllyp Sparowe as a blanket condemnation of human vice, but as a symbolically complex and a profound statement about human behavior at its most exalted and most base. The medieval bestiaries attested to the belief that since all of God's creation reflected its maker, the "Book of Nature" could be turned to for moral instruction as readily as the book of Scripture. And if, as Augustine holds, God's symbols carry meanings²⁵ both in bono and in malo,²⁶ any beast, including humankind, can be read both ways. Just as human physicality could serve either as a vehicle to God (through, for instance, imitatio christi) or as an instrument of sin, nature could either direct the soul to contemplation of its creator, or else distract the soul through sensual pleasure. Likewise, we might say that literary critics, over the years, have presented in bono and in malo readings both of Skelton's iconographic sparrow and of the poem as a whole. Either: the bird is a phallus; Jane has found sexual fulfillment in his contact with her "naked skyn"; the poetspeaker pines to fill the sexual lack Jane suffers in the wake of Phyllyp's death. Or: Phyllyp is a symbol of di-vine providence; both bird and girl are innocent playmates; the poet-speaker views Jane in her grief as a pieta figure, worships her chastely, and attempts to solace her with his verse.

I present my reading as a means of reconciling these discordant critical voices. By recognizing the poem's complex dynamic of representation, by looking at the points in the text where binary categories collapse—male into female, poet into subject, human into animal—we can see how Skelton's art embraces all the paradoxes of human existence. Is Phyllyp a phallic symbol or a sign of God's all-sheltering love? He is both, and much more. Is Jane a child or a young woman; is she "innocent" or knowing? She is both; as representative of the poet, she is the voice of innocence spoken through the voice of experience; she is poet and poem, stylus and text. And finally, we can answer this question: what is Phyllyp Sparowe? an elegy or a love-song? a sexual fantasy or a Marian prayer? Once more, the poem is all of these things. For, however startling and disturbing, however singular we find the text's phantasmagoria, Phyllyp Sparowe can yet be understood in terms of those two common literary themes, sex and death. The poem's central figure—as both "wanton" phallus and the frail, mortal body to which it belongs—represents in the end human fleshly existence in its joys and limitations, in its sinfulness and its need for salvation. Like the sparrow, we rise and fall, love and hurt, mate and die. Like the sparrow, Skelton tells us, we are small, so small in the order of things.

Notes

¹ Stanley Eugene Fish, John Skelton s Poetry (Yale U. Press, 1965), 99.

² Susan Schibanoff, "Taking Jane's Cue: 'Phyllyp Sparowe' as a Primer for Women Readers," PMLA 101 (1986): 832.

³ Fish, John Skelton s Poetry, 112.

⁴ F. W. Brownlow, '"The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe' and the Liturgy," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979): 5.

⁵ All references to Phyllyp Sparowe are from John Skelton, The Complete English Poems, ed., John Scattergood (Yale U. Press, 1983) and will be cited in the text of my essay.

⁶ Fish, John Skelton s Poetry. 105.

⁷ Ibid., 138.

⁸ Ibid., 18n16.

⁹John Skelton, Priest as Poet: Seasons of Discovery (U. of North Carolina Press, 1987), 107.

¹⁰ Ibid., 115.

¹¹ Schibanoff, "Taking Jane's Cue," 832.

¹² Kinney, John Skelton, 116.

¹³The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Cornell U. Press, 1991), 121-22.

¹⁴ Fish, John Skelton 's Poetry, 111.

¹⁵ Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 124-25.

¹⁶ Ibid., 122.

¹⁷ Beryl Rowland, Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism (U. of Tennessee Press, 1978), 158.

¹⁸ Beryl Rowland, Blind Beasts: Chaucer's Animal World (Kent State U. Press, 1971), 20.

¹⁹ Geoffrey Chaucer, The General Prologue, in The Canterbury Tales, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1987), 1.626.

²⁰ See Schibanoff, "Taking Jane's Cue," 834.

²¹ Fish, John Skelton s Poetry, 112.

²² Anthony S. G. Edwards, ed., Skelton: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 75, 99.

²³ Rowland, Blind Beasts, 126.

²⁴ Francis Klingender, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages, ed., Evelyn Antal and John Harthan (The Μ. Ι. Τ. Press, 1971), 488.

²⁵ Robert P. Miller, ed., Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (New York U. Press, 1977), 3-5.

²⁶ St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1958), 99-101.