A bird came down the walk - Essay Example

of due: A bird came down the walk The poem is descriptive as it describes an experience the speaker had with a bird. The bird glances around frightened with bead like eyes as if in danger. The speaker offered him a crumb, but he unrolled his feathers and flew away, as if rowing in the water but with such grace that is gentler than that with which “oars divide the ocean," (4,1) or butterflies leap “off banks of Noon," (4,3) the bird seemed to be swimming without splashing. The structure of the poem is iambic trimester with four-syllable lines, following a loose ABCB rhyme scheme, and the meter is rhythmically broken up with long dashes at the end of the line.

The purpose of the dashes is to indicate longer pauses at the end of the lines for emphasis and dramatic effect.There is personification in the poem, where the speaker likens the bird’s actions to a person’s. In the second stanza, the speaker employs the word “raw” to signify uncivilization yet it is ironic in that a bird cannot cook the worm. The action of coming down the walk is seen as civilized and likened to a person walking down the road yet the bird does something so uncivilized by eating the bird raw.

In stanza two the speaker goes on to personify the bird’s actions by saying, “he drank a Dew” (2, 1) –there is alliteration of the’ sound- and he also goes on to say that he drank “from a convenient grass” (2, 2) just like a human would drink from a glass, and also that the bird hopped aside for a beetle to pass, another human like action. The speaker also describes the bird as civilized by using capital letters in saying the birds eyes were like Beads and that he had a Velvet Head.

All these grammatical effects enable the speaker to be more vivid and allow the reader to form actual images in the mind when reading. Work citedDickinson, Emily. "a Bird Came Down the Walk". NY: The Unbound Anthology, 1922. Print.