SOURCE: "When a Sparrow Falls: Woman Readers, Male Critics, and John Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe," in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 4, Fall, 1996, pp. 391-409.

In the following essay, Daileader provides a stylistic and thematic analysis of Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe.

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 Fish laid the groundwork for interpreting the poem in terms of two voices: the voice of "innocence" embodied in the persona of Jane Scrope, and the voice of "experience" embodied in the persona of "Skelton, Poet Laureate," who breaks into the poem roughly halfway through, reminding us retroactively (and some might...