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My Best Friend’s Parakeet

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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.

Grief Walking Beside You

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Emily Dickinson’s poem I measure every Grief I meet sparked my interest from its title alone. I found it so intriguing how, even in the title, Dickinson chose to capitalize only the words “I” and “Grief,” which gives the idea that she is addressing the emotion of grief as a noun or person. This notion is seen in the poem as she begins to talk about grief as if it were the essence of the people around her. 

After reading the first stanza, I felt connected to how Dickinson scrutinizes other people’s grief and what they may be going through to discern if she’s alone in feeling the way she does. I think everyone, at one time or another, has felt like they were going through the worst thing in the world and that no one could understand. I also love how the word choice within the first stanza furthers the implication that Dickinson is attentive to observing the grief of others and searching for the root cause of their grief to know if it is akin to her own. 

I felt connected to the poem through the stark loneliness that Dickinson also feels and how it adds to her grief. She constantly wonders if the people going about their day feel how she does, and she seems to long for a human connection to know that she isn’t alone in her grief and pain. Growing up, I moved away from where I grew up, and I’ve struggled to make friends since then. I felt and sometimes still feel so alone. Reading Dickinson’s connection to grief and her deep desire to know that other people are feeling grief and pain as well, that even if she is physically alone, she isn’t alone in the pain she feels. 

I love how Dickinson references the different types of grief, how it circumstantially affects people in different ways, and how, despite the differences, the grief itself connects Dickinson to the people around her. It’s almost as if she’s hoping that the grief of others will curb a bit of the loneliness. I felt the way that she addressed the “Grief of Want” and the “Grief of Cold” and painted the two types of grief as the feeling of despair was real to how it feels to want something but know it isn’t for you. I felt like despair was a fantastic way to talk about the deep desire that Dickinson has for her loneliness to be cured. 

I interpreted Dickinson’s grief be one that I feel isn’t always brought to light. It’s the grief of what one so desperately wants but knows they cannot have for one reason or another. Hence there isn’t much else to do but mourn the companionship that Dickinson so deeply wishes for. I remember when I was younger and so desperately wanting to fit in and make friends with the other kids in my class, but I couldn’t seem to say the right thing. After some time I simply gave up, and began to mourn thet friends I never had, and because of this I felt super connected to this line especially. 

Overall I loved this poem, and felt that Dickinson truly encapsulates how grief stricken a person can be from loneliness. I’m not the biggest poetry fan and I often find my head spinning from trying to decode the figurative language that litters the stanzas. However, I felt like I understood exactly what emotions Dickinson was conveying through her work. I haven’t felt connected to as piece of poetry like I have with, I measure every Grief I meet and I’m very interested in reading more of Emily Dickinson’s work.

Longing for companionship, and grieving its loss.