But a single drop of which doth save and free
All the universe from its iniquity.
A similar stanza in John Skelton’s Armoury of Birds reads:
Then sayd the Pellycane,
When my byrdts be slayne,
With my bloude I them reuyue [revive].
Scrypture doth record
The same dyd our Lord,
And rose from deth to lyue. [life]
The eagle is to be regarded rather as an emblem than as a symbol yet it has a significance of this sort, for by the early Christians it was considered a symbol of the Ascension. This may have been a pious inversion of the custom in Pagan Rome of setting free an eagle at the funeral pyre of an emperor, in the belief that this messenger of Jove would carry the dead monarch’s soul straight up to Olympus.