Elinor Wylie wrote “The Falcon” in the 1920s, a decade when poetry often prized fragmentation and free verse, yet she held to a different music. Born in 1885, Wylie became known for lyrics that were polished, taut, and faintly archaic; her 1921 collection Nets to Catch the Wind gives the poem its home. The collection’s title already hints at the difficulty of holding something airborne, and “The Falcon” sharpens that hint into a small, wary fable about imagination and possession.
The poem begins with a voice resisting training. “Why should my sleepy heart be taught / To whistle mocking-bird replies?” The mockingbird is a mimic, a charming echo of other songs, but the speaker wants no part of that easy repertoire. Instead, “another bird” has been caught: “Soft-feathered, with a falcon’s eyes.” That pairing of softness and sharpness is the poem’s core. The bird Imagination, capitalized and called “her,” is at once lovely and dangerous, alive to far distances. She “flies so far, that dies so soon,” a phrase that holds freedom and fragility in one breath. Her wings are the sun, her breast the moon, so that to hold her is to hold opposite lights together.
Wylie’s construction is as careful as the falconer’s art. The stanzas move in four-line units, mostly in iambic tetrameter, which gives the poem a quiet, chant-like pulse. Rhymes arrive and then shift: “taught” locks with “caught,” “replies” with “eyes,” and later “soon” with “moon” and “twist” with “wrist.” But “wool” and “beautiful” only half-rhyme, a slight roughness under the polish. The vocabulary is deliberately small and concrete: chain, hood, wrist, twist, wool. These are handmade, tactile objects, and they turn the abstract notion of inspiration into something that can be held, hooded, and spoken to.
The final stanza is the poem’s most unsettling gesture. “Weave her a chain of silver twist, / And a little hood of scarlet wool, / And let her perch upon your wrist, / And tell her she is beautiful.” Every verb is an instruction, a way of managing the wild bird. The silver chain and scarlet hood are beautiful, but they are also restraints; the hood blinds a falcon to keep it calm. Telling the bird she is beautiful sounds like love, yet it can also be a spell of ownership. Wylie does not say whether the speaker is offering wise advice or warning against exactly this taming. The poem leaves that doubt hovering.
That ambiguity is what makes “The Falcon” significant. It compresses a large argument about art, desire, and imagination into three small stanzas. Creative energy may be caught, but keeping it requires binding and blinding it into prettiness. Wylie’s polished form does not soften the warning; it enacts the very tension between wildness and control. The bird can perch on a wrist and be admired, but she is no longer flying so far. The poem asks whether such beauty is worth the price, and then wisely refuses to answer.