The Complexity of Animal Life
The poem's central subject is a bird. The speaker continually reconsiders her understanding of this creature given the shifting qualities of its actions. It is shown, in various instances, as menacing, calm, kind, and frightened. As a result, the speaker refuses to settle on any one of these as its defining characteristic. In choosing to present all of these aspects to the reader, the speaker emphasizes the complexity of this bird. This then opens out onto a consideration of nature writ large, in which the speaker ultimately acknowledges she cannot reduce all of these traits to one simple attribute. The identification of any one of these traits as the essence of what the bird is would be a category mistake. In including all of these individual moments, the speaker is showing the impossibility of making such a claim. The bird isn't exemplified in any of its individual actions; it is the sum of them.
Violence in Nature
The poem opens with an unusually disturbing description of a common event: a bird eating a worm. Dickinson renders the sight so viscerally (and in such pointed detail) that it makes even the most seasoned reader squirm a bit. This initial scene sets up an important aspect of the poem's thematic content, namely an understanding of the violence inherent to nature. This scene is particularly weighted as it both opens the poem and grounds the speaker's fear of the bird. While the subsequent scenes complicate the speaker's image of the bird, it is this first one that colors her initial impression of it. Even as her feelings begin to shift, the speaker still understands that the bird's brutality is inherent to its nature. In this manner, Dickinson reveals the way violence is intrinsic to the natural world.
Nature Poetry
One of the text's other major themes is the inherent difficulty of writing poetry about nature. Dickinson uses the constantly fluctuating image of the bird to underscore the challenges of writing about nature. The speaker captures various aspects of the bird that undermine her previous understanding of its significance. She witnesses the bird shift from being frightening to afraid, active to calm. These changes in the bird serve to highlight its mutability as a poetic subject. Dickinson demonstrates how these moments resist simplistic categorization and force her, as a poet, to attend to these many different angles of the animal to offer a full portrait of it. In using this diversity of scenes, Dickinson is able to exemplify the way any individual aspect would fail to encapsulate the full spectrum of what the bird signifies.
