Poetry and Animals

130THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY

He bit an Angle Worm in halves

And ate the fellow raw,

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 abroad—

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.^19

The poem concisely tells the story of a single encounter, of the bird
approaching the speaker and the speaker approaching the bird. The
speaker conspicuously anthropomorphizes the behavior of the bird
in the first three stanzas, assuming a kind of familiarity and equality.
The lyric turns on the ambiguity of the stirring of the bird’s “velvet head,”
which is both physical and mental. The grammatical construction of the
poem’s second sentence suggests that it is the speaker of the poem
who is “in danger, cautious” in offering the crumb, though it seems
true as well for the bird, and this crucial ambiguity points to the poem’s
self-consciousness about the human-animal boundary. The speaker
is cautious in part because the act of attempting to offer food to the
bird is also a gesture of good will and toward some level of mutual