A Bird, came down the Walk

“A Bird, came down the Walk” is divided into five quatrains (or four-line stanzas). Each quatrain has two lines of iambic trimeter followed by one line of iambic tetrameter before returning to iambic trimeter for the final line. The punctuation in “A Bird” is, like that in most of Dickinson’s poetry, highly irregular. Dickinson often uses em dashes (—) instead of standard punctuation marks. These em dashes typically suggest a shift in tone between clauses, but Dickinson also uses them to signify changes in her speaker’s perception. The poem also displays Dickinson’s idiosyncratic use of capitalization, in which she will often capitalize nouns and sometimes—less consistently—adjectives or verbs.

The poem’s lyric form is suitable for Dickinson’s subject matter, as much of the nature poetry associated with the Romantics favored the lyric form and lyric poetry is also frequently associated with depicting individualized emotions and experiences. In celebrating both the beauties of nature and the speaker’s direct encounter with the natural world, Dickinson draws attention to the sublime hidden in the everyday.