A poem guide, with an associated translation.
“A Bird in Bishopswood” is an immersive springtime lyric scribbled on the back of a rental account for St. Paul’s Cathedral dated to circa 1395. Based on Ruth Kennedy’s careful comparison of the handwriting, scholars surmise that the author of the poem is John Tickhill, who served as Collector of Rents at St. Paul’s at the time when the rental account was created. The rent documents are written primarily in Latin, the administrative language of medieval Europe, unlike the poem, which is in the vernacular Middle English. For an alliterative poem of only forty-one lines, “A Bird in Bishopswood” conveys extraordinary poignancy using concentric contrasts to describe a mundane encounter with nature that provided solace from the speaker’s humdrum routine.
Eric Weiskott 