Alfred Noyes' skylark
I love Alfred Noyes’ skylark. The brilliant English poet tells how it is beating its wings and breast against the wire of its cage, refusing to accept its imprisonment. All the while it sings its song into the heavens and out through the bars that can only keep its body but can’t imprison its song.
What a metaphor for all the people of the world trapped in one kind of a prison or another. There they are shut behind emotional, economic, social or physical bars, beating their wings and chests against their bars and sending their songs out into life. There they are, burdened down with the cramped and oppressive conditions in towering tenement buildings, making the long treks to and from work every day, work that crushes their souls. But ask them—hosts of them—how is it with you? and while they grudgingly admit the pain of it, they rage against it all in that healthy, cheerful rage that refuses to quit singing.
Two preachers thrown into prison, chains around the ankles and at midnight singing praise to God. Fifty-seven teachers, dragging home their tired bodies and minds for a welcome night’s reprieve before beginning another daily wrestle with students, rebuking you for even hintingthat the kids aren’t worth the trouble. Fifteen thousand, seven hundred and thirty-two social workers, sorely tempted to jack it all in, in despair at the "system" and the scam artists that use it. But give them one good result and they’re back at it again with renewed light in their eyes. Tens of thousands of misty-eyed parents...beating and flapping and...singing.
And maybe all this is cheap talk coming from someone like me whose life is fine. Maybe I don’t have the right to talk about things that others stagger under but I confess—I just can’t keep quiet. I’d love to say something that will help to keep them singing until that day when they sing about the reality they experience and not just the one that used to be or the one they dream could or should be. But people like these are burdened in part because they know deep within them that "there’s something better than this, something wondrous beyond all this." Inside them, from one source or another, they’ve been given a glimpse of the sky and can never lie down and die in pessimism or cynicism.Don’t you just love gallant people? So Alfred Noyes urges his brave little skylark:
Beat little breast, still beat, still beat,
Strive, misted eyes and tremulous wings;
Swell, little throat, your Sweet! Sweet! Sweet!
Thro’ which such deathless memory rings;
Better to break your heart and die,
Than, like your jailers, to forget your sky.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.