On Translating “A Bird in Bishopswood”

“A Bird in Bishopswood” is an immersive springtime lyric scribbled on the back of a rental account for St. Paul’s Cathedral dated to 1395. After having been copied onto the rental roll and stored with other financial documents of St. Paul’s, the poem had to wait centuries to come to the attention of literary scholars. It was only in 1980 that a sharp-eyed archivist flagged the text for further study. The author may be the clerk John Tickhill, who served as Collector of Rents at St. Paul’s at the time when the rental account was created. 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. At the center of the poem, man and female bird share a moment of grief-stricken silence as each yearns for the mate that the other cannot ever physically be. There is no other Middle English poem quite like it, and we are lucky to have it. Although the bird’s species is not named, I have taken the liberty of imagining her as a lark. Note that the stanza breaks are editorial: the original text forms an unbroken column, as was typical in the copying of unrhymed alliterative verse.