"A Bird came down the Walk" by Emily Dickinson, a review

A Bird came down the Walk (328) - by Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

    A bird came down the walk:

    He did not know I saw;

    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.

“A Bird came down the Walk” was first published in 1891 in the second posthumous collection of Dickinson's poems. The poem is composed in iambic trimeter with occasional four-syllable lines. The rhyme scheme is a loose ABCB and the meter is broken up at intervals with long dashes indicating short pauses. This poem is a classic example of Dickinson’s exceptional powers of observation and description. The ‘voice’ of the poem describes seeing a bird coming down a walk, eating a warm and drinking some dew drops. The bird, once it is full, “hopped sidewise to the wall/ To let a beetle pass.” Unlike human beings creatures of nature do not kill for fun. “He glanced with rapid eyes/ That hurried all abroad” – the bird is observant of the world around it; it is in tune with it. The poet interprets the bird’s observant carefulness as fear. It is just a reflection of human feelings on a creature the voice has no connection with. 

There is a sense of voyeurism in the voice’s description of the bird’s activities; the voice is observing the bird and had the bird known that it was being observed it would not have allowed the voice to catch it unawares at such a vulnerable moment. The voice seems to feel privileged to have seen what she has seen and makes it an offering. Human beings base their relationships on mutual give-and-take. In addition, this particular offering may have been made with the intention of taming this representative of nature. But what the voice offers is a crumb. We are told in the third line of the first stanza that the bird had bitten “an angle-worm in halves/ And ate the fellow, raw.” Firstly, there is such power and independence in this bird that finds its own food and consumes it with such gusto. Such creature would surely not accept a mere crumb – literal or figurative – as an offering from anyone. Secondly, even after seeing the bird in action the voice seems to not have drawn the conclusion that it was most probably a carnivore. Moreover, the cautious way the bird moves about should have told the voice that the bird, even if it were an omnivore, would not have accepted an offering from an unknown entity. It takes a long time to build a relationship that is close enough for a wild animal to accept food from a human hand. We have hunted, poisoned, and tortured animals to such an extent, animals have learnt to be wary of us. This single act of the voice and the bird’s reaction to it show how alienated we have become physically, emotionally, and spiritually from the natural world and how much we crave for a closer connection with it. In that desire lays Dickinson’s link with the Romantic School of Poetry. 

There is a sense of affronted majesty in the way the bird rejects the human offering and flies away: “And he unrolled his feathers/ And rowed him softer home.” In comparison to the bird's terrestrial movements and the movements of the cautious voice, there is such grace and harmony in the flight of the bird.

The bird flies in the sky like someone rowing in the water, but its movements are gentler than that with which “Oars divide the ocean” or butterflies leap “off Banks of Noon.” By using two comparisons to illustrate the bird's flight the poet evokes the fluidity with which the bird moves through the air. 

·         According to Helen Vendler this poem attest to Dickinson's "cool eye, her unsparing factuality, her startling similes and metaphors, her psychological observations of herself and others, her capacity for showing herself mistaken, and her exquisite relish of natural beauty."

·         According to Harold Bloom the bird displays a "complex mix of qualities: ferocity, fastidiousness, courtesy, fear, and grace." He further notes that the description of the bird's flight is that seen by the poet’s soul rather than her "finite eyes."

·         Dr. Chuck Taylor states that the naturalistic description of a bird is also symbolic. According to him, the description of the bird’s flight suggests the ease with which a person’s soul reaches heaven.

"Once Upon a Time" by Gabriel Okara, an analysis

Once Upon a Time – by Gabriel Okara

Once upon a time, son,

they used to laugh with their hearts

and laugh with their eyes:

but now they only laugh with their teeth,

while their ice-block-cold eyes

search behind my shadow.

The poem opens with the classical opening of fairy tales. By doing so the poet draws attention to the question of what is real and what is not so as well to the difference between appearance and reality. The entire poem is a nostalgic first person reflective monologue; a father/ an adult male talking to a son/ a younger male. The poetic persona is lamenting over ‘they’ losing their ability to laugh spontaneously with their entire being, not only with their teeth. A smile/laugh is said to be sincere and coming from the heart only if it reaches the person's eyes. Not only have ‘they’ lost their ability to laugh but also have become suspicious of those who are still able to laugh. ‘They’ are looking for possible ulterior motives for the laughter instead of joining in. ‘They’ do not seem to believe that a person might laugh without some evil intention hidden behind that laughter. Hence, “their ice-block-cold eyes/search behind [the poet’s] shadow. The tragedy is that ‘they’ used to be able to laugh with artless spontaneity and the poet is sad for them for their loss which they themselves seem to be unaware of.

they used to shake hands with their hearts:

but that’s gone, son.

Now they shake hands without hearts

while their left hands search

my empty pockets.

Not so long ago ‘they’ used to form genuine friendships easily. But now they are suspicious of the poetic persona with whom they shake hands and try to find possible motives for why he wants to be friends with them by going through his pockets. The poetic persona does not have anything to hide: his pockets are empty.

‘Feel at home!’ ‘Come again’:

they say, and when I come

again and feel

at home, once, twice,

there will be no thrice-

for then I find doors shut on me.

‘They’ have become insincere in their hospitality, too. ‘They’ invite the poetic persona over to their houses but if he takes them up on their invitations more than twice he finds their doors shut. Hence, their hospitality is measured. Something has changed them. What could that be? If we were to reflect on this incident further, then we might come to the conclusion that ‘they’ must have lost their innocence as a result of the influence of their own adults. However, in my opinion suspicion and insincerity do not exist in a vacuum. They are not diseases one caches only when one becomes an adult. These negative traits must have their roots in some human experiences linked with survival. In other words suspicion and insincerity ‘they’ developed later in their lives may have been necessary skills they had to master in order to survive in a world where only the fittest survived. So, it could very well be traits we imbibe in incremental doses from their birth in the process of growing up. And once they have imbibed a certain amount of these qualities they cease to be children.   

So I have learned many things, son.

I have learned to wear many faces

like dresses – homeface,

officeface, streetface, hostface,

cocktailface, with all their conforming smiles

like a fixed portrait smile.

Ultimately, the poetic persona gives in and learns to hide his true self behind masks: “homeface,

/officeface, streetface, hostface,/ cocktailface”. Moreover, he learns to smile insincere smiles in order to suit the occasion, not as an expression of his inner feelings. In doing so he loses something that is priceless and become robotic and insincere.

And I have learned too

to laugh with only my teeth

and shake hands without my heart.

I have also learned to say, ‘Goodbye’,

when I mean ‘Good-riddance’:

to say ‘Glad to meet you’,

without being glad; and to say ‘It’s been

nice talking to you’, after being bored.

The poetic persona too has learnt to be two-faced in his words as well as deeds in order to be one of ‘them’.  Society could be an unforgiving place for those who do not conform. There is Ideological State Apparatus as well as the Repressive State Apparatus designed by those with power in societies in order to make sure that everyone complies with socially agreed upon norms and values. Swimming upstream (to be a nonconformist) takes a rare amount of courage which the poetic persona seems to lack.

But believe me, son.

I want to be what I used to be

when I was like you. I want

to unlearn all these muting things.

Most of all, I want to relearn

how to laugh, for my laugh in the mirror

shows only my teeth like a snake’s bare fangs!

Finally, the poetic persona reveals the reason that has changed him: it is the process of socialization associated with growing up that has made him lose his innocence. As a grownup the poetic persona fears/repulsed by his own laughter which he compares to a baring of a snake’s fangs. His laughter has become something sinister instead of an expression of spontaneous joy. The tragedy is that even as a child the poetic persona had been aware of the difference between what was sincere and what was not. In order to survive, he had to learn to mimic the norms and values of his society. And by doing so he loses something special in him – spontaneity and artlessness. Jean Jacques Rousseau in his book Emile promotes the idea of ‘primal innocence’ or artlessness and spontaneity as something that is inherent in human beings at birth that we lose as a result of the compromises we have to make in order to be social animals. When one is conscious of losing something that is of priceless value such as one’s innocence that would certainly cause much pain. And that is surely the cause of the pain the poetic persona is expressing in this poem. Yet, Plato in his Republic and Golding in his The Lord of the Flies see this in another way. They find that children who are not governed by socialization mechanisms revert to their 'basic nature' (which, according to Freud, is governed by Id, the animal-like part of the human psyche) causing death and destruction to themselves and others around them.

So show me, son,

how to laugh; show me how

I used to laugh and smile

once upon a time when I was like you.

In considering other applications of the poem, if we are to consider childhood as a state of edenic innocence, the situation can be applied to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. They lost their innocence as a result of their craving for forbidden knowledge and spent the rest of their lives trying to get back to the lost Eden. In that sense, the son the poet is appealing to could the Son of the Holy Trinity of the Christian Faith who said to have come to this world to cleanse  the mankind of their corruptness and return them to the lost Eden where they would resume their child-like innocence and live in a state of grace. 

Similarly, some colonizers considered their colonies as lost Edens untouched by the corruptible influences of so-called civilized western world and had gone 'native'. Still, their inherently cultural imperialistic point of view made them assume the role of a patriarch towards the very natives they were attempting to emulate. Consequently, this could be an appeal of such a person who had lost his innocence to someone who still possessed it. There is quite a sizable amount of literature illustrating our desire to return to a primal innocent state: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Saki’s short stories, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan, and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book are a few of them. Okara, being native of a former colony would be aware of such desires harboured by his country's former Great White Masters.    

"To the Nile" by John Keats - an analysis

To the Nile

Son of the old Moon-mountains African!

Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile!

We call thee fruitful, and that very while

A desert fills our seeing's inward span:

Nurse of swart nations since the world began,

Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile

Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,

Rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan?

O may dark fancies err! They surely do;

'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste

Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew

Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste

The pleasant sunrise. Green isles hast thou too,

And to the sea as happily dost haste.

Keats said to have composed this sonnet in a friendly competition with his fellow Romantics Leigh Hunt and P B Shelly. A Petrarchan sonnet has an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet rhyming cdcdcd. The Volta or the turn of the line of thought occurs from the octave to the sestet. In this sonnet also line number 9 marks a change of thought: thinking of the Nile as a holy/mysterious river vs. thinking of the Nile as an ordinary river.

In Greek mythology Nilus is considered the god of the Nile River. The poem traces the course of the Nile from the legendary sub-Saharan Moon Mountains to the Mediterranean Sea, and how it turns some parts of Egypt into fertile oases within a desert. The poem is written in the second person, the poetic persona addresses a personified Nile directly as a sentient being. In the octave the poet acknowledges the ancient fame of and the reverence paid to the river. “Son of the Old Moon-Mountains African!”  - The poetic techniques used here are inversion and personification. In addition, this is also an invocation to a supernatural power in the form of the Nile. Then in the second line the Nile is invoked as the “Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile”- the blocks of limestone and marble that were used to build the great pyramids in Egypt were transported using the Nile. Hence, it is the Chief of the Pyramids. On the banks of the Nile one finds huge crocodiles. The Son, the Chief, and the Nurse are references to the different roles of the Niles. 

In the third and fourth lines the poet refers to a contradiction - “We call thee fruitful and that very while[y1] / A desert fills our seeing's inward span” – fruitfulness and barrenness, two extremes, exist side by side. In the next line the river Nile is invoked as the nurse for the Africans. Yet the poet immediately questions the truth value of his own invocation with the question “[a]rt thou so fruitful?” followed by another rhetorical question:  “or dost thou beguile/Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,/Rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan?”  The poet is questioning the fruitfulness/nurturing qualities of the river. He is wondering whether people have called the river fruitful only in comparison to what lay on either side of it as well as because it offered "rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan." He is asking whether the river had fooled the various nations of people who travelled between Cairo and Decan (Deccan?) – travellers of the ancient Silk Rout – into worshiping it? Here, it is possible that Keats may be referring to the numerous ancient temples dedicated to Osiris along the River which were worshipped by travellers, too.

“O may dark fancies err!” – the sestet begins with a prayer/ a deeply felt wish (to the Nile/ the gods of Egypt?) for his dark thoughts/ doubts about the fruitfulness of the Nile to be false. Then he affirms with certainty that his fancies were indeed wrong: “They surely do.” Here, Keats is critical of his imagination or ‘negative[y2]  capability’ as he calls it. Keats says that “'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste/ Of all beyond itself.” Here, Keats might be talking about our ignorance about the Nile or things/people in general. Ignorant people assume everything beyond what is familiar to be a barren waste. In the same way the Europeans of Keats’ age had either romanticized or demonized the rest of the world. Keats strives to see a similarity between the rivers of England and the Nile. But this attempt to positively evaluate the Nile in comparison to English rivers, too, smacks of the European superiority complex as the Nile as the longest river of the world is far superior to a river like the Avon, one of the longest rivers in England. In the same way, if one is to compare the European and African civilizations from a cultural relativist point of view, then one might be doing injustice to something that is much older.

In the last four lines the poet looks at the river from aesthetic point of view and describes its journey to the sea using typically sensuous Keatsian language. The repetition of green contrasts with the repetition of desert in the octave.

Thou dost bedew

Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste

The pleasant sunrise. Green isles hast thou too,

And to the sea as happily dost haste.

---

 [y1]once a year the Nile floods depositing rich loamy mud on the banks of the river making it ideal for agriculture. The Egyptian god Hapi is associated with flooding of the river, thus bringing fertility and fruitfulness. According to Egyptian mythology, the Nile itself is considered as a symbol of fertility. When the Egyptian god Osiris was killed and his body parts were scattered by his brother Seth his genitals were supposed to be eaten by a crocodile so that his wife could not resurrect him into life.

 [y2]Negative capability, according to Keats is ‘when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'