Summary
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker watches a bird devour a worm. She is disturbed by this sight and is not seen by the bird. She proceeds to watch the bird drink dew off of a blade of grass and politely clear out of the way of a beetle. Finally, she watches it turn its head in a series of rapid motions, indicating to her that it is watchful and potentially frightened.
Analysis
"A Bird, came down the Walk" is a poem primarily concerned with a shifting perception of nature. It is a work as much about the difficulties of writing about animals as it is about the animal in its title. In the short span of the first three stanzas, the reader watches the bird go from ravenous and violent to calm to agitated. The rapidity of its progression is part of Dickinson's efforts to show this creature as an endlessly moving target for her poetic eye. While she highlights its first action (the consumption of the worm), its subsequent choices complicate the reader's initial understanding.
The opening scene unfolds like the recreation of a crime scene. Dickinson uses pointedly violent word choice. The first two lines present the speaker observing ("A Bird, came down the Walk - / He did not know I saw -") without being seen by her subject. She then describes the bird rather gruesomely eating a worm ("He bit an Angle Worm in halves / And ate the fellow, raw,"). The goriness of this moment is heightened by words like "halves" and "raw," which give immediacy to the details of the bird's hunting. This first stanza is important to the poem as a whole because it sets up both the poet's initial reaction to the bird and gives the reader certain expectations of how its characterization will follow from that moment. However, this initial impression gives way to something else.
In the second stanza, Dickinson presents two moments that sharply contrast with the opening. The bird is shown in an entirely different light. He takes a drink of "Dew / From a convenient grass" and hops "sidewise to the Wall / to let a beetle pass." These actions, while notably different, serve to complicate the impression the reader has of the bird. The drinking of dew is a much more delicate action, undertaken with care as the bird is sipping off a small blade of grass. It is also harmless and peaceful, in direct contrast to the way in which it brutally consumed the worm. The bird's clearing out of the way of a beetle is more than just harmless. It is an action that verges on kindness. While the speaker never attempts to psychologize these choices (which would be a stretch), she does use them to showcase another side of her subject. The bird doesn't clear out of the beetle's path out of fear; it is obviously much larger than the insect. Instead, it appears to be acting out of a kind of consideration. The speaker is telling the reader that the bird is capable of more than cruelty and violence. If the beginning functions like the cold open of a police procedural, then the second stanza is the resting point, a lull in the action. Dickinson is able to cherrypick these two moments to immediately counter the portrait she sets up in the beginning. The bird's markedly visceral consumption of the worm makes the pivot to these quieter actions all the more resonant. In the short space of these eight lines, a complex idea of the bird already begins to form.
In the third stanza, Dickinson adds yet another piece to the puzzle of the bird's identity. The speaker sees the bird seem to be frightened. In the first two lines, she describes its "rapid eyes" as they hurry "all abroad." The subsequent lines show the speaker assuming the bird is afraid: "They looked like frightened Beads, I thought, / He stirred his Velvet Head." The bird is fidgeting and observing, turning its head and moving its eyes quickly. The speaker chooses to interpret this as a display of fear, but also acknowledges that this is an assumption. She makes careful note of her interpretation by including the phrase "I thought." This adds to the nuance of the bird's characterization. In shifting so quickly to an instance of the bird's vulnerability, Dickinson is revealing that it is not as fearsome as it first looked. In showing the bird's capacity to be by turns intimidating, peaceful, and frightened, the speaker builds an image of the bird as a multi-faceted creature, irreducible to one simple label. Additionally, the use of the word "frightened" points out a possible connection between the bird and the speaker. The bird may be just as unsettled as she is. There is also a parallel to the world of sewing and fabric with the use of the words "beads" and "velvet." Together, these references work to soften the portrayal of the bird. The bird's head is shown to be somewhat elegant, like the careful trim of a coat or dress. Where the opening showed a creature in the midst of a bloody feast, this stanza shows it as more demure. The bird's three contrasting modes of being highlight the variability of its actions and reject any kind of easy summary. The bird proves to be an inconstant symbol for the speaker's eye. She cannot settle on a single, perfect image of this animal.
The poem contains a number of Dickinson's usual stylistic idiosyncrasies. There are select instances of slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and frequent dashes. It is composed of quatrains, with lines of iambic trimeter and tetrameter. The capitalization works particularly well here to make the stakes of small things (birds, beetles, worms, dewdrops) appear weighty, consequential, and potentially dangerous. Combined with the gravity of the tone, this use of capitalization renders all of these images as large and dramatic, as if they are unfolding on a movie screen and not in a grassy field. The dashes capture the speaker's trepidation in the face of this formidable bird and seem to key into her sense of nervousness around it. They occur, mostly, every two lines and work to separate the details she is recounting to the reader. The overall tone is one of careful observation. The speaker appears almost like a detective or journalist, witnessing an instigating incident and following subsequent occurrences to better understand what has just happened. Her fear is justified insofar as it is rooted in the initial moment of fear: the eating of the worm.
