16 pages • 32 minutes read
Emily DickinsonA Bird, came down the Walk
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1891A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“A Bird, came down the Walk” is divided into five quatrains (or four-line stanzas). Each quatrain has two lines of iambic trimeter followed by one line of iambic tetrameter before returning to iambic trimeter for the final line. The punctuation in “A Bird” is, like that in most of Dickinson’s poetry, highly irregular. Dickinson often uses em dashes (—) instead of standard punctuation marks. These em dashes typically suggest a shift in tone between clauses, but Dickinson also uses them to signify changes in her speaker’s perception. The poem also displays Dickinson’s idiosyncratic use of capitalization, in which she will often capitalize nouns and sometimes—less consistently—adjectives or verbs.
The poem’s lyric form is suitable for Dickinson’s subject matter, as much of the nature poetry associated with the Romantics favored the lyric form and lyric poetry is also frequently associated with depicting individualized emotions and experiences. In celebrating both the beauties of nature and the speaker’s direct encounter with the natural world, Dickinson draws attention to the sublime hidden in the everyday.
Caesura
Dickinson uses a number of techniques to modulate the rhythm of “A Bird, came down the Walk.” Caesura, or a pause in the middle of a verse line, is the most commonly used technique to give the work a unique rhythm and tone. The speaker deploys caesura in every stanza of “A Bird, came down the Walk,” and uses the technique to suggest both tension and refection.
The poem’s first line, “A Bird, came down the Walk” (Line 1), uses caesura between “Bird” and “came” in order to suggests the speaker’s hesitation in describing the bird’s action. This pause might also suggest that the bird lands and pauses for a moment before coming “down the Walk” (Line 1). Similarly, the pause between “fellow” and “raw” (Line 4) showcases the speaker’s hesitation or disgust in watching the bird eat. The speaker also uses caesura to maintain the poem’s conversational tone. Pauses like “And then, he drank a Dew” (Line 5), or “frightened Beads, I thought” (Line 11), recreate the rhythms of everyday conversation as the speaker reflects on the imagery.
Rhyme
“A Bird, came down the Walk” follows the same ABCB rhyme scheme as most of Dickinson’s work. This rhyme scheme, like the poem’s larger form, reflects a common lyric convention. The first quatrain, for example, features the perfect rhymes “saw” (Line 2) and “raw” (Line 4), which highlights the speaker’s reaction to watching the bird eat the worm. Similarly, Dickinson rhymes “Grass” (Line 6) with “pass” (Line 8) in the second stanza to emphasize nature’s harmonious qualities (See: Themes).
Though Dickinson typically follows an ABCB rhyme scheme, few of her poems rhyme perfectly. Instead, Dickinson relies on imperfect or “slant” rhymes. The rhyme scheme in “A Bird” follows the poem’s larger form, and dissolves as the speaker’s imagery tends toward abstraction. Words like “abroad” (Line 10) and “Head” (Line 12) or “Crumb” (Line 14) and “Home” (Line 16) are examples of slant rhymes. Dickinson uses these slant rhymes to give a sense that the speaker is having difficulty expressing themselves with the same precision as before. The imperfect rhymes reflect both the speaker’s discomfort and the uniqueness of the images in front of them.
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By Emily Dickinson
