SOURCE: "Some Graver Fish," in John Skelton's Poetry, Yale University Press, 1965, pp. 82-123.

In the following essay, Fish determines how Skelton utilizes the medieval rhetorical tradition in Philip Sparrow.

Philip Sparrow is perhaps Skelton's best-known poem. Countless readers have been enchanted by what C. S. Lewis calls "the lightest—the most like a bubble—of all the poems I know."⁸ Yet it is one of the ironies of literary history that a good third of the poem is consistently ignored and sometimes deplored. Of its 1382 lines, only the first 833 (Jane Scrope's lament for her slain sparrow) are generally admired, while lines 834-1267 (the poet's extended commendation of Jane's beauty) and lines 1268-1382 (his reply to those who have objected on moral grounds to sections one and two) receive only passing attention. Ian Gordon remarks of the "Commendations," "It is a charming tribute, but of little importance beside the...