A bird came down the walk
Emily Dickinson
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.
Of note
The poem first reached print in October 1891, when Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the editor she had written to for advice, quoted it in an Atlantic Monthly essay about her letters. He worked from the copy she had mailed him, which is now lost. That same year, her editors titled it "In the Garden" in a book.
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TEXT PROVENANCE · First published October 1891 in The Atlantic Monthly · Text from Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series (1891), pp. 140–141, checked against a scan of the 1891 printing.
Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series (Roberts Brothers, 1891), pp. 140–141
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