Tag Archives: nature

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A Bird came down the Walk

emily dickinson“A Bird came down the Walk” is a short poem by Emily Dickinson that tells of the poet’s encounter with a worm-eating bird.  It was first published in 1891 in the second collection of Dickinson’s poems.

 

 

A Bird came down the Walk
by Emily Dickinson

A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit a Angleworm 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 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.

Emily Dickinson was a prolific private poet, however, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime and the work that was published while she was alive was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time.  Her poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation.

Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality.

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John Keats…TO AUTUMN and his own inevitable winter

To Autumn was one of John Keat’s last poems; he died one year after it was published.  What makes this particular poem so moving is the context in which it was written.  Keats was dying, slowly, from consumption as he wrote this piece.  His focus on autumn, the ripest of all seasons… the time when all life reaches fruition… corresponds with his own condition in such a way!

Keats attempts to trap autumn in all its fullness; to stop the apple from falling from the tree… as he desires to keep himself from his own inevitable winter.  Alas, as the apple falls… so does he.

Happy Birthday John Keats!

To Autumn
by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid they store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

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And I, cut off from the world, remain… Alone with the terrible hurricane.

William Cullen Bryant is considered one of the most accomplished and popular American poets of the first half of the 19th century.  He was an early proponent of Romanticism in American literature and his work is often compared to English Romantic, William Wordsworth.

    

The Hurricane
by William Cullen Bryant (1854)

            Lord of the winds! I feel thee nigh,
I know thy breath in the burning sky!
And I wait, with a thrill in every vein,
For the coming of the hurricane!
 
            And lo! On the wing of the heavy gales,
Through the boundless arch of heaven he sails;
Silent and slow, and terribly strong,
The mighty shadow is borne along,
Like the dark eternity to come;
While the world below, dismayed and dumb,
Through the calm of the thick atmosphere
Looks up at its gloomy folds with fear.
 
            They darken fast; and the golden blaze
Of the sun is quenched in the lurid haze,
And he sends through the shade a funeral ray—
A glare that is neither light nor day,
A beam that touches, with hues of death,
The clouds above and the earth beneath.
To its covert glides the silent bird.
While the hurricane’s distant voice is heard,
Uplifted among the mountains round,
And the forests hear and answer the sound.
 
            He is come! He is come! Do ye not behold
His ample robes on the wind unrolled?
Giant of air! we bid thee hail!—
How his gray skirts toss in the whirling gale;
How his huge and writhing arms are bent,
To clasp the zone of firmament,
And fold at length, in their dark embrace,
From mountain to mountain the visible space.
 
            Darker- still darker! The whirlwinds bear
The dust of the plains to the middle air;
And hark to the crashing, long and loud,
Of the chariot of God in the thunder-cloud!
You may trace its path by the flashes that start
From the rapid wheels where’er they dart,
As the fire-bolts leap to the world below,
And flood the skies with a lurid glow.
 
            What roar is that?—‘tis the rain that breaks
In torrents away from the airy lakes,
Heavily poured on the shuddering ground,
And shedding a nameless horror round.
Ah! well known woods, and mountains, and skies,
With the very clouds!—ye are lost to my eyes.
I seek ye vainly, and see in your place
The shadowy tempest that sweeps through space,
A whirling ocean that fills the wall
Of the crystal heaven, and buries all.
And I, cut off from the world, remain
Alone with the terrible hurricane.

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Ode to Guilt… a Dark Pleasure

Ode To GUILT

Your melancholy song in my head
And on my soul, Of things
Once said and truth untold;
Melancholy tunes upon my breast,
Haunt my waking day and nightly rest.

Since my youth, you’ve suckled me;
Held me close, vampirically.
My dark sun!  Old friend of none!
Mother of my sorrow–
You nurture the dusk of tomorrow.

Oh Guilt! Dark pleasure!
Black candle in the joy of life;
Your dark light runs thru my veins.
Dear friend, only you remain;
On the coldest days, the warmth you feign.

How close you hold my secret pain!

Constant are you who stay with me,
And hold those bonds
That keep me from free;
Heavy shadow on my steps,
In your darkness, I reflect.

Longtime friend, your roots run deep,
In your branches, my secrets keep,
In your leaves, my sorrow flows,
In your bark, my darkness grows;
Trapped inside you, is my soul.

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Wordworth’s Lucy: Death of Idealized Love… or his Muse?


She dwelt among the untrodden ways“She dwelt among the untrodden ways” is a stirring meditation on both William Wordsworth’s feelings of loneliness and loss as well as his Romantic notion of unrequited, idealized love.  It’s a stirring ode to the beauty and dignity of an idealized woman; one who lived unnoticed by all except the poet himself and died young.

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways, by William Wordsworth

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:/
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky./

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

William Wordsworth’s “Lucy” series was written in 1798, when he was 28 years old.  They include five poems in total:

They were not conceived as a group, nor did he seek to publish them in sequence and only after his death in 1850 did publishers treat them as a fixed group.

Many speculate who or what inspired these poems.   Some guess that they are an attempt to voice his affection for his sister, Dorothy; his life-long companion.  Dorothy was never married and lived with her brother even after he was married.  Dorothy eventually fell seriously ill in 1829 and spent the remainder of her life in “a deepening haze of senility”.

Others believe that Lucy represents Peggy Hutchinson, who he loved deeply before her early death in 1796.  Wordsworth later married Peggy’s sister Mary in 1802.

Some conclude that Lucy is the personification of  Wordworth’s MUSE– feared dead.  Wordsworth was traveling in Germany when he wrote these poems and, as a series, they focus on his longing for the company of his friend-Coleridge, who had stayed in England.

Wordsworth himself never commented on the details of her origin or identity.