190 chapter 6
The well-trained bird is able to communicate that he is hungry and that he
wants to share with the free garden birds, though given proper names (Rud-
dock and Merle and Finch) can only “squabble” and “give . . . no thanks nor
heed” of Poll’s kindness; the caged bird has the freedom to communicate and
to enact benevolence, whereas the wild birds, though in possession of proper
names, cannot properly use speech nor manners. Without proper education,
without the proper cage of civilizing meter, the bird-subjects are savage. The
captive parrot silently watches as the poet wonders beside her and the other
birds eat below her, not giving any explanation for her actions; her ability to
communicate is linked only to personal need and to a perceived benevolence,
not to any sort of inquiry or understanding—a sharp distinction between
beast and poet, and an unsubtle reference to the humanist rhetoric of English
education more generally.
Bridges imagines, however, that a certain primitivism could teach the En-
glish moralists a thing or two. From lines 13–21 the poet muses as to what the
bird’s philosophy would be if she indeed could have one, pitting his own abil-
ity to reason (“I thought” [l. 13], “thus reason’d I”[l. 19])—as well as the way
that this reasoning power makes him a unified “I”—against “the darkness” in
which Poll must live. The “feeble candle-power”(l. 17) of her mind, and her
“pall,” is both her insipid nature and now gloomy casket-like cage and, of
course, her name. The metrical metaphor of the cage becomes a metaphor for
cognition more generally:
If you, my bird, I thought, had a philosophy
it might be a sounder scheme than what our moralists
propound: because thou, Poll, livest ín the darkness 15
which human Reason searching from outside would pierce,
but, being of so feeble a candle-power, can only
show up to view the cloud that it illuminates.
Thus reason’d I: then marvell’d how you can adapt
your wild bird-mood to endure your tame environment 20
the domesticities of English household life
and your small brass-wire cabin, who shdst live on wing
harrying the tropical branch-flowering wilderness:The bird, here, is a symbol of ignorant doom and of domesticated freedom
and wildness; the poem imagines her in “the tropical branch-flowering
wilderness”(l. 23) with some regret, as if, like this new meter, the parrot is
some tamed poetic impulse that cannot recognize the freedom that the cage
of form provides. Indeed, Bridges is already the master of both this form and
the bird; notice the possessive “my bird,” and the fact that the diacritical mark
on the word “ín” oddly forces us to emphasize that Poll lives in darkness, in the
cage, in the poet’s mind (just as, recall, Bridges showed us that he was “the only