192 chapter 6
work, but here Bridges may mean that these memorized tags are, for better or
worse, ‘for all time’ and that, despite the lack of set quantities in English, the
“time” of his syllabic meter allows Thucydides a properly “timed” memorial
here. The third and most significant translated intertext is in line 29, from
Euripides’ Hippolytus (l.612)—a play all about the broken promises of
speech—“my tongue swore but my mind is unsworn.” Though the tag seems to
refer back to the parrot, who can talk as if she is tame but possesses a “wild-bird
mood,” I find it more useful to think of those parroting schoolboys, formed
but not transformed by what their tongues have been trained to repeat—the
disappointment of a classical education, as in Bridges’s poem “Flycatchers.”
Though the lines in Greek demonstrate Bridges’s ability to absorb it in his
English meter, his choice of lines is a subtle critique of the misuse and misun-
derstanding of classical languages and classical education at the end of the
nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth.
As if to reinforce the disembodiment of the repeating, insipid and unknow-
ing tongue, line 32 strips away all admiration associated with the domestica-
tion of the bird’s tongue by showing how barbarous and uncontrollable it
really is.
all with that stumpy wooden tongue & vicious beak
that dry whistling shrieking tearing cutting pincer
now eagerly subservient to your cautious claws
exploring all varieties of attitude 35The “stumpy wooden tongue and vicious beak,” make the bird’s spirit itself
seem dangerous and threatening, a wooden tongue that has ‘sworn’ not to pro-
duce any wisdom. Indeed, civilized life contains its own potential barbarism.
The parrot’s “irrepressible blind groping for escape” and “dry whistling shriek-
ing tearing cutting pincer” are perverse references to the supposed domestici-
ties of English household life. Domesticity and education both contain deeper
threats; easy mimicry, under the guise of “cultivation,” forcibly masks a kind of
primal urge and robs us of some important natural instinct—quite a comment
on English values embedded here. The poem’s pileup of adjectives begins to
gain momentum, the phrases “stumpy wooden tongue” and “vicious beak”
mimic the threat, with violent dentals and plosives hammering down. Here is
no imitation of man’s benevolence; the uncanny ability to imitate human
speech is now reduced to an inhuman “dry whistling,” heard in the nasal, gut-
tural trochaic downbeat of “shrieking, tearing, cutting, pincer.” The bird has
been driven mad with mimicry into an entirely physical, violent being, its
speech ability alienated from the spiritual; it can only explore “all varieties of
attitude / in irrepressible blind groping for escape.” Speech, relegated to the
insipid, imitating tongue, is itself dissected from any spiritual meaning, just as