My Best Friend’s Parakeet

By: Hailey Saul

My best friend had a parakeet in a cage in her family’s living room. Now, this bird did not shut up, ever. It was constantly chirping, tweeting, or cawing. There always seemed to be some sort of sound emanating from the bird whenever any human body was within its eyesight. I always thought that the bird wasn’t making noise because it was happy or content to see whoever had just walked by him but because he was crying for an escape. My best friend had this bird until he died, and the constant noise that filled her house was gone with him.

After reading Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A Caged Bird,” I felt not only a connection to my own life’s struggles but also a nod to a long-forgotten memory of my best friend’s pet bird, who was trapped in a cage from his birth to his death. I found stanza four to be extremely interesting. It gave me a new lens of understanding my best friend’s pet bird, “And sings her brief, unlisted songs,/Her dreams of bird life wild and free,/Yet never beats her prison bars/” (Jewett). In this stanza, Jewett expresses the canary’s unbroken spirit by continuing to sing her songs despite never receiving her freedom from the bars of the cage that keeps her. Stanza four made me think more deeply about my best friend’s parakeet and how he never saw freedom, aside from briefly being taken out of his cage to be displayed to guests. Still, it made me think of how this parakeet’s songs were anything but brief (which gave me a bit of a giggle).

Furthermore, it made me question Whether Seneca’s parakeet could have been “singing” to keep his own spirit from being broken by the bars of his cage? Was this bird crying out to gain our attention so that he could bargain with his captors for his freedom with his song? Then I thought it was a bird, and I feared that those complex thoughts of freedom and captivity could not be attributed to a “bird brain.” 

Jewett’s poem “A Caged Bird” delves into an intangible version of freedom and captivity through the physical captor of a canary and the freedom of a swallow. The dichotomy between the swallow and the canary reflects the isolation and imprisonment one feels by being trapped by either circumstance or one’s own mind. However, through the singing of the canary, a notion of hopefulness is thrown into the poem. When interpreting the canary’s singing, the persistence in her song can be related to the resilience of humans, giving the reader a sense of hope and perseverance despite the confinements that may detain us.

The poem’s melodic attributes of rhythmic cadence and lyrical language create a feeling like a song, which mirrors the canary’s song. Through repetition of words such as “flits and sings” and “patient build again,” the musical sense of the poem is conveyed. 

I also thoroughly enjoyed the poem’s implementation of a human-animal connection and how the human experience can be seen constantly throughout the human experience. As the reader continues through Jewett’s poem, the narrator seems to give mildly human lines to the caged canary, like in stanza six, “She will be heard; she chirps me loud” (Jewett). In this line, the narrator is showing the audience that the canary will not be silenced, and when placed into the context of the canary’s song being akin to hopefulness, it gives such a deep meaning to the phrase “She will be heard;” (Jewett) as it furthers the notion that the canary’s song parallels resilience. 

In a final circle back to my lovely best friend’s bird, the ninth stanza connects very well to my final feelings about that loud bird, as it says, “​​To open wide thy prison door, Poor friend, would give thee to thy foes; And yet a plaintive note I hear As if to tell how slowly goes” (Jewett) The way I read this line was that the canary in this poem knows that to leave the cage means to be at the mercy of the world, which the bird knows she would not survive. However, despite this knowledge, she wants to leave the cage because of how torturously slow time passes through her cage. My best friend’s bird may have wanted to leave his cage similarly. Disregarding his clipped wings, he wanted to leave the imprisonment of the cage and try for a glimpse of freedom, which I think everyone can relate to at one point or another.