LOUIS MACNEICE's poem reminds us of how well endures one specific association of a very well-known sparrow with a central Anglo-Saxon ‘image-complex’: fire-lit hall and raging storm, transience and eternity. The purported moment in Bede's Historia ecclesiastica when one king and his people reject their pagan beliefs for a promised Christian eternity pivots on a fictional augury in which a flying bird is entwined with the morphosis and fate of the human soul. Bede's sparrow is allegorical: like man's journey from the unknown to human existence on earth, and then again to the unknown, the bird flies in from the cold, through the banqueting hall and back out again into the tempestuous night, subject to the ineluctable transience of mortal life. The passer, or spearwa in Old English, becomes responsible for a seminal moment in the history of the English people, assigned a significant rhetorical function in a pagan representation of life without Christ that simultaneously contemplates what that life might look like after conversion. It resonates with and consolidates a scriptural legacy which designates birds a special status in thinking through this key theological anxiety and inquiry, a legacy which locates birds as ideal creatures to articulate the Christian pilgrim journey by aligning avian flight with the metaphorical peregrinations of the faithful who must ‘soar to the unchangeable substance of God’. The bird appears in Saint Augustine's lengthy exegesis of Psalm 83, for instance, where it is compared to the human heart or soul. Psalm 124.7 includes the neodspearuwa ‘needful sparrow’ that Ælfric alludes to elsewhere: Ute sawl is ahred of grine swa swa spearwa ‘Our soul is freed from the snare just like the sparrow’.