Soundings for Home 171chancing by, becomes the motive for metaphor: the bird is endowed with the
characteristics being displayed by the man observing him:
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what hethought,
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.There is a combination here of yearning, competitiveness, and
resentment that threatens to become ludicrous, a parody of the romantic
search for associations and resemblances. And the parodistic possibility is
increased by the syntax of the lines about the bird’s tailfeathers. They could
mean that the bird was foolish to think that the man had this particular
design upon him. But the lines could also be the speaker’s rendition or
imitation of what he thought the bird was thinking, i.e., “Who does that man
think he is to think that he can get hold of my tailfeathers?” In any event,
there is more “thinking” proposed than could possibly or profitably be going
on. That the paranoia and self-regard confusingly attributed to the bird are
really a characterization of the man who is observing the bird is further
suggested by the accusation that the bird is “like one who takes / Everything
said as personal to himself”—a jocular simile, given the fact that there is only
“one” person around to whom the comparison might apply. If all this is to
some degree comic, it is feverishly so, the product of intense loneliness and
displacement. From its opening moment the poem becomes a human drama
of dispossession, of failed possessiveness, and of the need to structure
realities which are not “here,” to replace, in the words of Stevens, “nothing
that is not there” with “the nothing that is.”
The only probable evidence of structure that he does find, already put
together, is the “wood-pile,” a forgotten remnant of earlier efforts to make a
“home” by people who, when they did it, were also away from home. The
pile of wood, which lets the speaker promptly forget the bird, once more
excites his anxious precisions. He still needs to find some human