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Updated: July 24, 2025
If it does not go to your heart to see The helpless pity of those bruised wings, The tireless effort to which it clings To the strain and the will to be free, I know not how I shall set in words The meaning of God in this, For the loveliest thing in this world of His Are the ways and the songs of birds. But the sky, the sky, the wide, free sky, For the home of the song-bird's heart!"
With all these heady jollities, you are half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a song-bird's heart that you bring back with you when you return with aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn.
"The lilies fade with the dying hours, Hushed is the song-bird's lay; But I dream of summers and dream of flowers That last alway." Nor is this only the day-dream of a poet. The summers and flowers that last alway are a very immediate treasure which one has only to perceive, to grasp, to recognize, and to realize.
With all these heady jollities, you are half conscious of an underlying languor in the body; you prove not to be so well as you had fancied; you weary before you have well begun; and though you mount at morning with the lark, that is not precisely a song-bird's heart that you bring back with you when you return with aching limbs and peevish temper to your inn.
I do not expect a stranger to love our old homestead as I loved it, for in each heart is a fresh, green spot the memory of its own early home where the sunshine was brighter, the well waters cooler, and the song-bird's carol sweeter than elsewhere they are found.
And why, and why, and for ever why, Do they stifle here in the mart: Cages of agony, rows on rows, Torture that only a wild thing knows: Is it nothing to you to see That head thrust out through the hopeless wire, And the tiny life, and the mad desire To be free, to be free, to be free? Oh, the sky, the sky, the blue, wide sky, For the beat of a song-bird's wings!
How falsely does that man see Nature, how grossly ignorant must he be of its most elemental truths, who looks upon it as a chamber of torture, a physiological laboratory on a very vast scale, a scene of endless strife and trepidation, of hunger and cold, and every form of pain and misery and who, holding this doctrine of "Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky is the home of a song-bird's heart,"
Poor little blighted city flower, thought I, as I looked at him through my tears immortal flower of humanity purer and lovelier now in thy pain and resignation than when thy cheeks were rosy, and thy laugh was like a song-bird's music; thou shall soon be transplanted to a land where no sorrows, sighs, and pains are known; thy little feeble frame will moulder away beneath the daisy and the weeping snow-drop, but thy purified soul shall bloom in everlasting glory, in the bosom of God.
This feeling about birds in captivity, which I have attempted to describe, and which, I repeat, is not sentimentality, as that word is ordinarily understood, has been so vividly rendered in an ode to "The Skylarks" by Sir Rennell Rodd, that the reader will probably feel grateful to me for quoting a portion of it in this place, especially as the volume in which it appears Feda, with Other Poems is, I imagine, not very widely known: "Oh, the sky, the sky, the open sky, For the home of a song-bird's heart!
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