[In the following essay, Wooden tests C. S. Lewis's contention that Phillip Sparrow is the first great poem about childhood, and finds that the work presents a “sensitive exploration of a child's encounter with death, focusing on the metaphysical and emotional confusion” of the experience.]

John Skelton (1450?-1529) wrote prolifically during the final years of the fifteenth and the early years of the sixteenth centuries—in that vague interregnum designated as either late medieval or early Renaissance. Among his poetic productions is Phillip Sparrow (written ca. 1508). Coleridge judged it “exquisite and original,”¹ and the poem, rightly so, has always attracted popular favor and critical attention. Yet literary critics have never fit Phillip Sparrow comfortably into any generic category. Usually scholars consider it a curious specimen of the mock-elegy, and critics have traced its component parts back to medieval and classical antecedents.² Some years ago, however, C.S. Lewis called it “our first great poem about childhood” and suggested that perhaps we were looking at the poem the wrong way.³ Despite this insight from a noted scholar of both children's literature and of sixteenth century poetry, critics have not pursued the suggestion. This essay intends to test Lewis's judgment by investigating Phillip Sparrow as a serious poem about childhood and a poem designed to appeal, on at least one level, to the juvenile reader.

While he wrote the poem, Skelton was residing at Diss in East Anglia, where he held the living of the parish. A classical scholar of recognized ability, Skelton had come late to the ministry, taking orders in his late thirties. He was ordained sub-deacon, deacon, and priest in rapid succession, apparently, as his modern biographers speculate, to qualify him for a court position as a suitable tutor to the royal princes, first Arthur and then the future Henry VIII. On the death of Prince Arthur in 1502, Skelton was relieved of his tutorial duties and in 1504 he retired from the court to the living at Diss, where he became acquainted with the leading families of the district, including the Scropes. Jane Scrope, the young girl for whom Phillip Sparrow was written, was the daughter of Sir Richard Scrope, an old family friend of Skelton's. She is cast by the poet as the speaker of the first part of the poem.

The striking realism of Skelton's presentation of the wounded psyche of the grieving girl in the poem has always captivated readers. The meticulous detail and empathetic projection manifest in her portrait would suggest similar object losses in the poet's life. While factually this proposition is impossible of proof, since we know nothing of Skelton's early life, his parents, or even the year of his birth, psychologically it is as sure as the words on the page. The specific details of his relationship with Jane Scrope are also hazy, although H. L. R. Edwards has reconstructed the background of Jane's arrival at Carrow Priory and speculates upon Skelton's connection with her family.⁴ Although the evidence is missing to establish whether Skelton ever functioned as Jane's tutor, his court position with the young princes would have recently reacquainted him with the cries of early adolescence.

Jane Scrope had come to the nunnery at Carrow by a painful path. The daughter of a Yorkshire nobleman who died in 1485, an infant no more than a year or two old, Jane grew up in a household headed by her mother and stepfather, Sir John Wyndham. In the violent years following the Tudor capture of the crown on Bosworth Field, as Henry VII consolidated power by removing enemies, Sir John ran afoul of the new regime. In 1501 he was arrested for suspicion of complicity in the Suffolk conspiracy and the following year he was beheaded for treason.⁵ The same year, Lady Wyndham removed with her daughters to the Benedictine Priory at Carrow for refuge. Three years later, Lady Wyndham's death left Jane an orphan in the care of the nuns. Although Skelton's poem cannot be precisely dated, most critics regard it as the product of 1506-08; one even raises the intriguing possibility that the funeral being commemorated by the interwoven Latin dirge might be that of Jane's mother.⁶ However this may be (and the poem itself offers no clues as to the identity of the deceased), the dedicatee and namesake of the speaker in Part I of the poem was a girl who, in losing not one or two but three parents, suffered the reverse of the typical experience in the Renaissance family. Usually, it was the parents who lost, and indeed often expected to lose, children to the myriad mortal dangers that beset childhood in that era.⁷ Jane, then, was a physical survivor, and Skelton explores the mental and emotional processes that made possible her psychic survival in the face of traumatic events.

Skelton's poem is veiled. It does not lament the loss of a parent but the death of a pet, a miniature domestic tragedy. As a result of the poet's empathy with the child's grief, the reader is invariably moved to admire and too often to sentimentalize the child in the poem. Noting Jane's sensitivity, her dismay at the death of her bird, a modern reader might imagine how such a child would likely be destroyed by the death of a person close to her. Yet from the biographical context external to the poem, we know Jane Scrope had survived parental loss, and the psychological characteristics of the child as survivor are a primary center of interest in the poem. Skelton closely examines her evolving reaction to her pet's death, exploring the psychic mechanism by which a sensitive child withstands and finally conquers the cruelty of death.

Our knowledge of early modern parenting provides several clues to the psychological context of the poem. We know, for example, that parents and children of noble rank in England saw a good deal less of each other in the late medieval and early Renaissance period than at any subsequent time. A child of Jane's rank and status would have been put out of the home for extended periods, from wet-nursing shortly after birth through the customary period of service at the homes of nobility. At that time high infant and child mortality rates, approaching at times 80 percent, militated against parents making major emotional investments in children who likely would not live to see adulthood. Jane's attachment to her pet was very possibly the strongest bond in the orphan's life. Indeed, what is not in Skelton's poem may be significant; in attempting to cope with her grief, nowhere does the child think to turn to an adult—neither to Dame Margery or another of the nuns nor to a tutor or a spiritual advisor for guidance and reassurance. Rather, she works through her grief in a psychic isolation punctuated by the ritual of the adult world, the Latin Mass for the Dead being intoned as a backdrop to her personal struggle.⁸ The mass is a prefabricated adult formula for dealing with grief; but the object losses the girl in the poem has suffered have made her both independent and skeptical and she does not hasten to attune her “inner weather” to that of adult society. As Lloyd deMause has pointed out in discussing the ambivalent mode of Renaissance parenting, early modern parents and authority figures sought especially to shape and mold children to conform to their own notions and projections.⁹ Perhaps because of a tragic personal history which lies largely outside the details of the poem, the speaker of Skelton's lament has grown sturdy and independent. She responds by testing and weighing the adult formulae. Skelton traces the psychic journey of an extraordinary child in accommodating the grief of loss.

The original poem of over 1200 lines is structured in two parts, the first a monologic lament by the girl on the occasion of the death of her pet bird (the “Lamentations”), the second an encomium by the poet, not of the dead sparrow, but of the living girl (the “Commendacions”). In the beginning, Skelton masterfully creates the persona of the grieving child who speaks the poem. It was long believed, as Alexander Dyce, editor of the standard edition of Skelton repeated, that Jane Scrope was a little schoolgirl when Skelton wrote Phillip Sparrow to help console her in her loss. H. L. R. Edwards has proved, however, that the real Jane was probably in her early twenties when the poem was composed.¹⁰ Although some critics argued that this discovery “essentially changes our view” of the poem,¹¹ such a radical re-evaluation seems both unnecessary and unwise. Not only can one wonder at the degree of sophistication or worldliness a day-boarder in a small Benedictine convent might likely possess, but within the poem, as both C.S. Lewis and Stanley Fish stress, the fictional persona of Jane Scrope is imagined as a child, a schoolgirl with a childlike perspective.¹² In the associational movement and the peculiar psychic defenses exhibited in the poem, the psyche of the speaker seems clearly pre-adult.

Despite the hyperbole and local humor of individual lines, the persona of the grieving girl is neither mocked nor deprecated; for the speaker of the poem's first movement the pain of loss is raw and real. In an attitude sympathetic though not condescending, the poet enters into and limns in language appropriate to a schoolgirl, the psychic tumult of the child's mind. Through the device of the interior monologue, which is aptly described by one critic as “an early example of the stream-of-consciousness technique”¹³ (one of the many paradoxes of this paradoxical poem is its astonishing combination of classical, medieval, and modern techniques and formulas), Skelton explores the girl's sense of loss and traces her various attempts to deal with this unfamiliar emotion. In tracing the girl's successive attempts to come to terms with her loss, Skelton's fidelity to the truths of childhood experience are no less impressive than moving. As an anchor for this exploration of grief, Skelton organizes the poem around three assumptions about the girl's character: she is a practicing Catholic, a well-educated schoolgirl, and a fully sentient child.

While the reader, like the poet of the second, “Commendacions,” part of the poem, possesses an emotional detachment and a wider experiential perspective than the child in the poem, Skelton presents her to be taken seriously. Imaginatively and conceptually, the poem explores one of the universal cruces of childhood, the child's first confrontation with the absolute finality of death—and this crux provides the basic ground and structure of the poem. Thus within the first, “Lamentations,” section of the poem, the child's confused search for the security of a healing ritual is neither undercut nor patronized. Her quest turns first to religion (lines from the Latin funeral mass recur through this macaronic poem), and then to literature and myth (especially the promise of immortality explicit in classical memorials and literature).

The delicacy, sensitivity, and empathy with which Skelton traces his persona's struggle with grief compose perhaps the most remarkable feature of this most remarkable poem. The poem begins with snatches from the Office of the Dead:

Pla ce bo,
Who is there, who?
Di le xi,
Dame Margery;
Fa, re, my, my,
Wherfore and why, why?
For the sowle of Philip Sparowe,
That was late slayn at Carowe,
Among the Nones Blake,
For that swete soules sake,
And for all sparowes soules,
Set in our bederolles,
Pater noster qui,
With an Ave Mari,
And with the corner of a Crede,
The more shalbe your mede.(14)

At the death of her pet, the child's first reflex is to turn to the familiar, soothing phrases from the Psalms for consolation. From her perspective it is neither blasphemous nor irregular to invoke the solemn service for the death of a mere creature. The chief mourner at this service, Jane is aware that her role should be that of a distraught mourner, and she attempts to fit her actions to her conception of that role. She knows the correct signs and symbols of intense grief.

Our knowledge of Jane's parental losses lies outside the conceptual context of the poem. Within the poem, the child seems never to have had to play the role of mourner before. Thus, as Skelton presents the dramatic situation, the bird's murder precipitates in the girl an identity crisis in which her personal resources are tested to the fullest. Here the child struggles to accept and accommodate the finality of death. According to Erik Erikson, in such a crisis the youth “must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of this childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood.”¹⁵ For Jane, this process is compounded of the familiar elements of the need for devotion coupled with a repudiation of pat adult formulae. Thus, she clings to her religion while reformulating its elements to fit the circumstance of her loss and grief. First, however, she attempts to play the role of mourner as she apprehends it in adult behavior. Jane strikes a series of poses, none the less sincere for their childish exaggeration, and describes them to the reader in theatrical terms as though standing apart to view her own performance. Thus:

I wept and I wayled,
The tearys downe hayled;
But nothynge it avayled
To call Phylyp agayne

(22-26)

Wherewith my handes I wrange,
That my senaws cracked,
As though I had ben racked,
So payned and so strayned,
That no lyfe wellnye remayned.

(44-49)

Such paynes dyd me frete,
That myne hert dyd bete,
My vysage pale and dead,
Wanne, and blewe as lead;
The panges of hateful death
Wellnye had stopped my breath.

(58-63)

So fervently I shake,
I fele my body quake

(104-105)

Alas, my face waxeth pale,
Tellynge this pyteyus tale

(341-342)

Here Skelton has the child self-consciously and dramatically attempt to pour her pain into the traditional vessels of adult tradition. Her bird deserves no less.

Parallel to these charmingly awkward attempts to attune her grief to the proper key which society and her own reading of epic tragedies have instilled in her, Jane attempts to channel her fresh personal grief into pre-existent rhetorical formulas. She hopes to merge her sorrow into a larger social ritual and thereby to distance the loss and dull the pain. She first compares herself to great sufferers of antiquity, but rapidly and wisely abandons this strategy as ill suited to the consolation she seeks. Instead she turns to the verbal formulas of Christianity, the Latin tags from the Service for the Dead that run only half consciously through her mind along with other varieties of scriptural and religious paraphrase. In the following lines, for example, Jane echoes the familiar Planctus Mariae in dramatizing her anguish:

I syghed and I sobbed,
For that I was robbed
Of my sparowes lyfe.
O mayden, wydow, and wyfe,
Of what estate ye be,
Of hye or lowe degre,
Great sorowe than ye myght se,
And lerne to wepe at me!

(50-57)

The Christian formulas share place, however, with the classical. For example, Jane chants in the manner of a charm a catalog of classical horrors from which she would have Phillip delivered: great Pluto, foul Alecto, Medusa, Megera, Cerberus, and “the smokes sowre / Of Proserpinas bowre” (82-83). These traditional formulas, Christian and classical, are brought to a climax in an extraordinary prayer which faces both Mt. Olympus and Heaven:

To Jupyter pray we
That Phyllyp preserved may be!
Amen, say ye with me!
          Do mi nus
Helpe nowe, swete Jesus!

(92-96)

In the mind of the child, anxious for the fate of the immortal soul she instinctively imputes to her pet, the traditional formulas of grief and consolation learned from her textbook readings in the classics and the lessons of her catechism flow together and coexist. But neither is sufficient, alone or in conjunction, to mitigate the fresh pain of personal loss. The lovingly detailed portrait of Phillip Sparrow which succeeds the prayer to Jupiter and Jesus in its sharp, sensory detail clearly signals the failure of verbal formulas, Christian or classical, to assuage the child's pain. Instead the mind recalls a vivid picture of Phillip in a number of familiar domestic poses, sitting on a stool, wearing a tiny velvet cap, chasing grasshoppers, or snuggling his mistress.

With the failure of these rhetorical formulas to provide relief, Jane turns to survey the prospects for surcease to be derived from physical memorials. She briefly considers the possibility of literary immortality, thinking of the classical poetess' praise of sparrows, but Jane rejects these as unworthy for her Phillip. As her mind returns to the individuality of Phillip, she momentarily indulges in a mental fantasy that perhaps Phillip could be revived and restored to life. After a capsule survey of classical precedents for the miraculous recovery and resurrection of the dead, Jane recognizes the futility of this wish in reflecting upon her own attempt at a physical memorial for Phillip. Once, she relates, she set out to stitch his figure on a sampler that “it myght importe / Some pleasure and comforte / For my soals and sporte.” (216-218):

But whan I was sowing his beke,
Methought, my sparow did speke,
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,
Methought, of Phyllyps blode;
Myne hear ryght upstode,
And was in suche a fray,
My speche was taken away.

(219-229)

As if in recognition of the psychic toll her grief is exacting, Jane turns from grappling with schemes of consolation which have ended only in hallucination to the simplicity of direct prayer:

The best now that I maye
Is for his soule to pray:
          A porta inferi,
Good Lorde, have mercy
Upon my sparowes soule,
Wryten in my bederoule!

(237-242)

Her prayer begins well enough, a supplication for the intervention of the patriarchs on behalf of her sparrow, whom they may know by his superiority to all other sparrows. This, of course, is a reminder to her of the uniqueness of Phillip, a reminder which abruptly reverses the tone of the poem from humility to shrill vengeance. For Jane sets out upon an epic excoriation of Phillip's murderer, that “cat of carlyshe kynde” (282), Gib the convent mouser. After a 75-line anathema, which encompasses not only Gib but all “vylanous false cattes” (338), Jane returns to a series of sharp, pictorial vignettes of Phillip sitting on her finger, drinking her spittle, and kissing her lips with his beak. Again the fresh pain of her loss stoked by the vivid recollections called up in her memory effectively blocks any scheme of consolation. A brief consideration of the fickleness of Fortuna then brings the poem back to the framing service of the dead with a repetition of its opening lines:

          Kyrie, eleison!
For Phylyp Sparowes soule,
Set in our bederolle,
Let us now whysper
A Pater noster.

(381-385)

Thus the poem returns, after 385 lines, to its starting point. The progression in the poem has not been linear, but vertical, plumbing the depths of the child's sorrow as she seeks a source of consolation. Skelton has created a map of childhood grief in the portrait of a mind surveying the conventional formulas and creeds, secular and Christian, with which the adult world copes with the finality of death. They have not worked for the speaker of Skelton's poem; but this remarkable child is not through yet. For out of the schemes and elements her mind has explored, Skelton's Jane forges a curious individual synthesis in her mind: a Bird Mass combining elements of Christian ritual, classical apotheosis, and native folklore tradition. It comes to her suddenly, almost as the answer to the prayer of helpless supplication which immediately precedes it. Even the excoriation of the treacherous Gib may be seen as a contributing factor to this ultimate consolatio synthesis. The pressure of emotion which repeatedly propelled the sharp mental images of Phillip back into Jane's consciousness, defeating the earlier schemes of consolation, is here deflected and momentarily siphoned off upon Gib and all his tribe. The excoriation then functions for the child as a release from emotional bondage, a purgative burning off of strong emotion prior to the re-establishment of temperamental equilibrium and the satisfactory resolution of grief.

In Jane's version of the Bird Mass, seventy-seven birds appear to play their appointed parts in the obsequies for Phillip Sparrow. Quickly the girl becomes immersed in suiting the parts each must play to the physical, moral, or symbolic characteristics of the birds. The ceremony moves to a conclusion again featuring paired prayers, one Christian, the other classical:

I pray God, Phillip to heven may fly!
Domine, exaudi orationem meam!
To heven he shall, from heven he cam!
          Do mi nus vo bis cum!
Of al good praiers God send him sum!
          …
On Phillips soule have pyte!

(579-583, 586)

To Jupyter I call,
Of heven emperyall
That Phyllyp may fly
Above the starry sky,
To treade the prety wren,
That is our Ladyes hen:
Amen, amen, amen!

(596-602)

The equilibrium of these twin prayers represents the girl's successful and unique acceptance of her pet's death and her farewell to him, body and soul-his soul commended to empyrean bliss, his body to an eternity of merry copulation. In the fusion of these disparate elements in the medieval Bird Mass at the center of the poem, the classical and Christian archetypes are both supplanted and synthesized, finally assuaging the sense of loss through the fantasy of the avian ceremony. The first movement of the poem, then, concludes with the girl's search for a proper epitaph for the sparrow which provides a springboard to her discussion of her reading and education. This section of the poem is not, as some have suggested, necessarily proof of Jane's inability to sustain grief, but rather evidence that the correct correlative was discovered, or forged, in the Bird Mass synthesis. It is precisely because the burden of her grief has found an adequate outlet that the child's mind can roam through a mental inventory of her reading in search of a proper epitaph, “in Latyne playne and lyght” (823), for Phillip.¹⁶

The second movement of the poem, the “Commendacions,” finds the poet rather than the child as speaker. Here he praises Jane, not the bird, but in the same rhetorical mode that Jane had employed in fondly recalling her pet—sharp, sensuous, and fully sentient, stressing the beauty of the moment. Indeed, this portion of the poem is almost a carpe diem in its celebration of transitory beauty, for the focus is not on the mind but on the physical charms of the girl:

          Soft, and make no dyn,
For now I wyll begyn
To heve in remembraunce
Her goodly dalyaunce,
And her goodly pastaunce:
So sad and so demure,
Behavynge her so sure,
With wordes of pleasure
She wold make to the lure
And any man convert
To gyve her his hole hert.

(1093-1102)

While echoing the liturgical framework with snatches of antiphons and verses from the Commendatio Animae of the burial service, the poet celebrates the transitory perfection and beauty of youth and the vitality of life in the midst of death. As H. L. R. Edwards has observed, “mysteriously, the elegy becomes transmuted into its opposite—a paean to life, its inexplicable and absurd loveliness.”¹⁷ Thus this concluding celebration affords a synthesis that both complements and extends the resolution formulated earlier by the child, imparting to the poem an intellectual and emotional unity often denied it.

In conclusion, then, for an adult Phillip Sparrow presents a sensitive exploration of a child's encounter with death, focusing on the metaphysical and emotional confusion and indirection. This ultimately culminates in the healing ritual of the Bird Mass, a ceremony composed of disparate elements from the different realms of the child's experience. This search for surcease, however, is narrated consistently in the first part of the poem from the point of view of the persona of the child, with the rhetorical simplicity and limited vocabulary proper to the speaker. Skelton's use of an associationist technique as an imitative mode to capture the method and intensity of childhood grief is the most extraordinary technical feature of the poem. From the content of the poem, it is not possible to ascertain whether the dead bird is a substitute love object representing the child's parents, a vehicle for channeling the love her parents were too busy or reluctant to accept and return, or a primary love object, under the care and control of the orphan girl. Whatever the case, however, a knowledge of the historical background of Jane Scrope and the modes of parenting in the early Renaissance enrich a reading of Skelton's poem and authenticate it as a key imaginative record in the development and understanding of childhood in early modern times.

Notes

1. Quoted in Nan C. Carpenter, John Skelton (New York: Twayne Publishing Co., 1967), p. 66.

2. See, for example, Ian A. Gordon, John Skelton, Poet Laureate (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1943) and Robert Kinsman, “‘Phyllyp Sparowe’: Titulus,” Studies in Philology, XLVII (1950), pp. 473-484.

3. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 138.

4. Skelton: The Life and Times of an Early Tudor Poet (1949; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), pp. 102-114. On Jane's background, see also Melvin J. Tucker, “Skelton and Sheriff Hutton,” English Language Notes, 4 (1966-67), pp. 254-259.

5. Although corroborative evidence is lacking, Edwards speculates that Jane might have witnessed the execution with her mother, Lady Wyndham, who would probably have been required to attend (Skelton: Life and Times), p. 104.

6. Edwards prefers an early date, 1504-05, but such scholars as F. W. Brownlow (“The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe and the Liturgy,” English Literary Renaissance, 9, 1 [Winter, 1979], pp. 5-20) and Nan Carpenter seem to have the better of the argument in suggesting a later date. The only sure dates are the terminal ones: the poem must have been written after 1502 when Jane arrived at Carrow and before 1508 when she married and left the nunnery.

7. “It was very rash for parents to get too emotionally involved with or concerned about creatures whose expectation of life was so very low. Nothing better illustrates this resigned acceptance of the expendability of children than the medieval practice of giving the same name to two living siblings in the expectation that only one would survive.” Lawrence W. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 70. Other studies which arrive at the same conclusion include Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, Vol. I: From Tudor Times to the 18th Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969) and Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1967).

8. The importance of this ritualistic antiphony has recently been explored in illuminating fashion by F. W. Brownlow in “The Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe and the Liturgy.”

9. “The Evolution of Childhood” in The History of Childhood (New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1974), pp. 51-52.

10. Skelton: Life and Times, pp. 102ff.

11. Burton Fishman, “Recent Studies in Skelton,” English Literary Renaissance, Vol. I (1971), pp. 89-90.

12. Lewis, p. 138; Fish, John Skelton's Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 103.

13. Carpenter, p. 60.

14. “Phyllyp Sparowe,” 11. 1-16 in The Anchor Anthology of Sixteenth-Century Verse, ed. R.S. Sylvester (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1974), p. 23. All citations of the poem will be to this edition with line numbers cited in the text.

15. Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), p. 14.

16. This interpretation of the Bird Mass as a direct outgrowth of the psychological and thematic movement of the poem is thus opposed to such readings as that of L. J. Lloyd, who argues that there is no organic relation between the parts of the poem (John Skelton [Oxford, 1938]), or Fish's view that the Bird Mass is an escapist digression from Jane's sorrow (John Skelton's Poetry).

17. Skelton: Life and Times, p. 108.