SOURCE: Daileader, Celia R. “When A Sparrow Falls: Women Readers, Male Critics, and John Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe.” Philological Quarterly 75, No. 4 (Fall 1996): 391-409.

In the following essay, Daileader considers the various approaches to Phillip Sparrow taken by previous critics and offers a reading that reconciles their dissenting positions. She find that the poem is more than merely a blanket condemnation of human vice but a “symbolically complex and a profound statement about human behavior at its most exalted and most base” which “embraces all the paradoxes of human existence.”

In the lush, wild terrain of John Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe, the few paths laid by critics are fraught with pitfalls. Scholars who have taken up this initially charming but ultimately unsettling poem about a girl, a dead sparrow, and a lascivious poet, have been hampered by two questions. Firstly, how many “voices” does the poem contain? Three decades ago, Stanley...