80 PA RT O N E
And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass—
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass—
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around—
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought—
He stirred his Velvet Head
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home—
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.Granted, Dickinson’s bird “came down the Walk” close to home, not in wildness
where Muir and Thoreau found the truth of things. This Bird (she capitalized
words she liked) dwells far from Jonah’s or Melville ’s whale, Beowulf ’s mon-
ster, Jack London’s wolf, Ted Hughes’s crow, though not far from Whitman’s
beetles. Dickinson, who’d read Darwin on the survival of the fittest and probably
Tennyson on “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” found nature fierce and strange
enough on her own turf.
Usually it ’s humans who come down a walk, so that phrase magnifies the
bird as he bites a worm “in halves” and eats it—comma—“raw” (how else?).
A bluff rhyme, “He did not know I saw— /... And ate the fellow, raw,” links
her covert self to a bestial species. Again she intervenes, with a surreal take on
his “rapid eyes”: “They looked like frightened Beads, I thought.” Tacking on
“I thought” admits that by adorning we add little to Nature, however apt that
“Velvet” head. She acts “Without a syllable.”
Now things turn ambiguous. Does stanza three run on to four—“He stirred
his Velvet Head / / Like one in danger, Cautious.. .”—or does four begin a
new gesture: “Like one in danger, Cautious, / I offered him a Crumb.. .”?
Is the Bird or the speaker “in danger, Cautious”? Both are quite possible,
thanks to odd syntax and punctuation. Indifferent or not, the animal “un-
rolled his feathers / And rowed him softer home” on a quiet off-rhyme with
“Crumb.”
Softer even “Than Oars divide the Ocean /... Or Butterflies, off Banks of
Noon / Leap, plashless as they swim.” Instead of ending with the bird, Dickin-
son goes somewhere out of mind and to a mystic river. Do butterflies actually