EXPLORING A Bird came down the Walk


Dickinson’s poems are often categorised into happy, joyful and celebratory poems or morbid, depressing and despairing poems, yet there is a third category which she is renowned for, and that is her nature poems. Due to her reclusive life, readers sometimes feel as if Dickinson would rarely have interacted with nature, but that is not the case. Lovely gardens surrounded the Homestead in Amherst, and this poem for one tells us that Dickinson loved to observe nature. The large picture windows of the house gave Dickinson the perfect vantage point to observe the unspoiled natural surroundings. This simple poem illustrates her keen eye for detail and innovative way with language. The poem is written in ballad metre, Dickinson’s favourite form. The archaic, formal words Dickinson uses – ‘fellow’, ‘convenient’, ‘abroad’ – work wonderfully to defamiliarise the familiar sight of a bird.


The poem begins by establishing the setting – a bird is simply hopping down a pathway: ‘A Bird came down the Walk’. The bird does not know it is being observed – ‘He did not know I saw –’ and so acts entirely naturally: ‘He bit an Angleworm in halves/ And ate the fellow, raw’. The bird has no compunction about killing the worm, he simply tears it in half and gobbles it up. While birds are often used as romantic symbols in poetry, here Dickinson is showing the bird’s primal urge for survival. He does not agonise over whether to kill the worm, he simply does what is necessary to nourish himself. This shows the predatory side to the bird, but it may also be Dickinson’s way of pointing out that we all have a strong survival instinct embedded in us. We see Dickinson’s humorous side when she points out that the bird eats the worm ‘raw’. Eating raw meat is seen as savage and barbaric, whereas cooking it makes it seem civilised and wholesome.


 bird is seen in the image of him swallowing a bead of dew from a nearby blade of grass: ‘And then, he drank a Dew/ From a convenient Grass’. More  moves out of the way to allow an insect to pass: ‘And then hopped sidewise to the Wall/ To let a Beetle pass –’. Although birds eat insects as well as worms, the bird has just eaten and does not need any more food. When you think of the


 VERSE 2025


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