A Bird, came down the Walk Essay Questions

How would you characterize the opening scene?

The opening scene is akin to the cold open of a police procedural. In exacting detail, the speaker captures every detail of the bird's feasting on the worm. In doing so, she is able to effectively communicate her own unease at this sight and show her initial impression of the bird as a killer. The purpose of this opening is to create the early idea of the bird which Dickinson will continue to disrupt and shift. By framing it in a structure like detective work or journalism, she is able carefully to trace the details of the bird's actions in an attempt to better understand what it actually is.

Why does Dickinson show so many different sides of the bird?

Dickinson creates a complex portrait of the bird through a variety of scenes and images. The bird is shown in short scenes that depict it as vicious, calm, scared, and, finally, graceful. The quick succession of these sharp turns in characterization points to the poem's ultimate conclusion: the bird cannot be satisfactorily described by any one of these individual labels. All of these instances indicate what the bird is, and to focus on only one of them would miss the others. The poem, in this way, becomes about the difficulty inherent to writing about nature, namely its constant changeability.