Humming Bird Woman - Analysis

A question that admits desire before it admits sight

The poem’s central claim is tucked inside its own disbelief: the speaker is already enchanted, even though he can’t swear to what he saw. He opens with WHY should I, as if interrogating himself for a private, slightly embarrassing fixation. The wondering isn’t about a person he knows well; it’s about an image that keeps recomposing itself—black velvet and yellow, orange and green—like a mind trying on costumes for something it can’t hold still.

Color as a substitute for memory

What he remembers is not a face or a conversation but flashes: a dash of blue, a whirr of red. Those phrases feel less like reliable recollection than like afterimage—what’s left on the eye when the thing is already gone. Even the body part he names, the willow throat, is slippery: it’s a precise detail (a throat) fused to a metaphor (willow), turning anatomy into vegetation, softness, sway. The speaker’s imagination rushes in where memory fails, offering saturated colors and tactile fabric—black velvet—as if texture could stabilize what vision couldn’t.

The poem’s hinge: from uncertainty to insistence

The turn comes with the self-description I who cannot remember. That clause should end the fantasy; instead it intensifies it. The tension is clear: he claims he can’t recall whether it was blue or red, yet he keeps asking how she would look in ever more specific combinations. Forgetting doesn’t cool the feeling—it gives it room. By the time he arrives at humming-bird feathers, the question has shifted from clothing a woman to almost transforming her into the bird itself: a creature defined by speed, shimmer, and vanishing.

A chase scene staged inside the mind

Underneath the playful palette is a sharper contradiction: the speaker wants to possess what he also understands as unpossessable. A hummingbird can be seen only in fragments; its colors depend on angle and light; its presence is a quick interruption. The speaker’s repeated Why reads, finally, like a confession that he’s not really asking about outfits at all. He’s asking why a brief glimpse—half color, half motion—has lodged in him so deeply that he keeps rebuilding it, even while admitting he can’t truly remember it.