A Bird, came down the Walk

Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird, came down the Walk” narrates the relationship between the poem’s speaker and the animal world. Though the poem’s main subject might appear to be its titular bird, the poem organizes itself around a series of inter-species encounters that illustrate the speaker’s conception of nature and the human-animal connection that drives the dynamic. Throughout the poem, the speaker depicts nature as something both ordinary and yet arrestingly beautiful.

The poem’s first stanza creates a sense of disconnection between the human and the animal. While the speaker is interested in the bird, the bird does “not know [the speaker] saw” (Line 2) him. This difference in attention signals a larger split in the desires and needs of the two different species. The bird demonstrates this split in desires when he bites the “Angle Worm in halves” (3), literally splitting the creature in two. The poem’s speaker is sympathetic with the worm’s plight, viewing it as the bird’s “fellow” (Line 4) and acknowledging the eating of the worm “raw” (Line 4), but the bird’s behavior is depicted in a matter-of-fact, naturalistic way.

The speaker then watches the bird drink “From a convenient Grass” (Line 6) that mimics the conveniences of human civilization, drawing connections between animal and human.