Quixotic Birds
What travesty is this that so sincere we let our hearts be stoned with silent fear till we are caged like some quixotic birds. Confined by our so knotted twine of words.
Louise Louis
SourceLicence:Public domain (US, unrenewed)
What travesty is this that so sincere we let our hearts be stoned with silent fear till we are caged like some quixotic birds. Confined by our so knotted twine of words.
Four lines, one complaint: we trap ourselves. The speaker looks at a group, "we," and sees people who feel deeply but stay quiet out of fear. That fear is "silent" and it "stones" the heart, a harsh image that suggests something living being turned hard and heavy. The speaker calls the whole situation a "travesty," a word for something that ought to be better than it is.
The closing image carries the idea. We are like "quixotic birds," creatures with idealistic, perhaps impractical longings, shut in a cage. The surprise is what the cage is made of: not bars, but a "knotted twine of words." Language, which should let us reach each other, has become tangled and has bound us instead. The mood is regretful and a little frustrated, with a sense of waste. The speaker isn't blaming an outside jailer; the poem suggests we have done this to ourselves, through what we say, or fail to say.