Lever in a forest, that is rude and cold,
Gon eté wormés and seich wrecchednesse.
For ever this brid wol doon his bisinesse
To escape out of his cagė, if he may;
His libertee this brid desireth ay....
Geoffrey Chaucer
When I was a child of eight or nine I had a kind of passion for sparrows, and used to set traps for them; but even if I succeeded in taking one alive, which was not always, I could never persuade it to live in a cage above a day or two, however much I pampered it. It drooped and died. Then, like a young crocodile, I occasionally shed tears. One fine morning, I remember, I visited a distant trap and, as usual, all but stopped breathing at discovering that it was "down." Very cautiously edging in my fingers towards the captive, I was startled out of my wits by a sudden prodigious skirring of wings, and lo and behold, I had caught—and lost—a starling. He fled away twenty yards or so, and perched on a hillock. I see him now, his feathers glistening in the sun, and his sharp head turned towards me, his eyes looking back at me, as if foe at foe. And that reminds me of the Griffons—the guardians of the mines of the one-eyed Arimaspians.
" ... From that land go men toward the land of Bacharie, where be full evil folk and full cruel.... In that country be many griffounes, more plentiful than in any other country. Some men say that they have the body upward as an eagle, and beneath as a lion; and truly they say sooth that they be of that shape. But a griffoun hath the body more great, and is more strong, than eight lions, of such lions as be on this side of the world; and larger and stronger than an hundred eagles, such as we have amongst us. For a griffoun there will bear flying to his nest a great horse, if he may find him handy, or two oxen yoked together, as they go at the plough. For he hath his talons so long and so broad and great upon his feet, as though they were homes of great oxen, or of bugles (bullocks), or of kine; so that men make cups of them, to drink out of. And of their ribs, and the quills of their wings, men make bows full strong, to shoot with arrows and bow-bolts...."
But a griffoun is only a gigantic starling, so to speak; and it's a pity mine and I were enemies. "If a sparrow come before my window," wrote John Keats in one of his letters, "I take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel." Brick-traps are little help in this.
A Robin Redbreast in a cage