Analysis on Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Birds’
The Poem “A Bird Came down the Walk” by Emily Dickenson describes the simple experience of her watching a bird walk down the path. She shows the bird and its actions throughout the poem, providing us with an image of what she’s seeing. The poem makes the reader feel and experience the simple way the bird acts beautiful f nature. Dickenson creates the mood of the poem by detailing the sequence of activities a bird goes through as simple as they may be, she then turns the description into a poetic endeavour though imagery and contrast.
The first three stanzas of the poem are reasonably interchangeable since they describe three events that could occur in any order when watching birds. This being said the order they are in works well, provides a strong introduction and produces an enhanced understanding of the poem for readers. Stanza’s four and five describe the speaker offering the bird a crumb of food, the startled response of the bird and the departure of the bird as it takes flight gracefully. These are not interchangeable stanzas as these two events rely on cause and effect as she attempt to provide food and gets a startled response. The poem can be broken up into two sections consisting of the first three and last two stanzas. The first section establishes a mood and tone for the narrative of the poem by detailing the actions within its natural environment, and the bird represents the effect of human interaction on the bird.
Dickinson’s attitude towards the subject of the poem is very serious and the structure of the poem seems panicky and cautious not unlike the bird. “He glanced with rapid eyes” shows the panicked emotion of the bird, and “Like one in danger; cautious, I offered him a crumb” which expresses her cautious emotion. The line breaks of the poem are choppy and abrupt giving the reader with a sense of change and speed throughout the poem.
Metaphors in this poem are found in the last two stanzas. In the fourth stanza a simile is “He glanced with rapid eyes…they looked like frightened beads” in which the birds eyes are compared with beads that are afraid, and that birds are often said to have beady eyes. The simile is effective because like the bird’s eyes a bead is also small and the ‘rapid’ movements of the bird’s eyes could imply that it is scared. The whole of the last stanza in the poem is a metaphor which compares the bird’s smoothness with its wings and flying to boat oars pushing through the ocean and butterflies fluttering around the bank. Dickinson believes the bird is more smooth and elegant than both the images of the oars and butterfly’s. The images of theocean and the butterflies are smooth and elegant and they contrast to the birds behaviour in the first stanza “”.
Emily Dickinson wrote this poem to show that the simple beauty of nature can exist through words. She does this by taking this everyday event and elaborating on it to create beautiful images and this links in with the ideas of the romantic movement and how they thought highly of nature.
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