“A Gull Goes Up” was published in Léonie Adams’s collection Those Not Elect (Robert M. McBride and Company, 1925). In “The American Sonnet Community in the Early 1920s: The Alternative Evolution,” published in the CEA Critic vol. 74, no. 1 (Fall 2011), Paul Munn, former professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, writes that Adams’s sonnet “is affiliated with those of [Robert] Frost and [E. E.] Cummings in representing a speaker’s response to an element of nature and more specifically resembles Romantic poems in which the speaker responds to the sound or flight of birds—[John] Keats’s nightingale, [Percy Bysshe] Shelley’s skylark, [W. B.] Yeats’s swans at Coole park in 1919 and his falcon turning in a gyre in 1921. It also recalls any number of Christian poems in its seeing an object of nature, a bird’s flight in particular, as emblems of the human spiritual condition from George Herbert’s 1633 ‘Easter Wings’ to [Gerard Manley] Hopkins’s ‘The Windhover. [. . .] The image of a ‘marble bird’ that might be lifted by ‘the dream of flying’ ‘in an air less rare than longing’ strains logic in the manner of the paradoxical language of Herbert and [John] Donne. The poem is metaphysical both in the broad sense that it contemplates mystical connections between the spiritual world and its earthly emblems and in the sense that it includes a difficult and strikingly unexpected, even incongruous poetic imagery.”