The Bird
The Bird - meaning Summary
Stillness Interrupted by Song
The poem traces a midday scene of absolute stillness where light and earth seem suspended. That tranquility is shattered by a bird’s song, imagined as a slender arrow that sets the sky and grass trembling. The sudden image links beauty and violence, turning the moment’s intensity into a flash of mortal awareness. The speaker moves from contemplative calm to the stark realization that life can end "in the flicker of an eye."
Read Complete AnalysesIn transparent silence day was resting: the transparency of space was silence's transparency. Motionless light of the sky was soothing the growth of the grass. Small things of earth, among the stones, under identical light, were stones Time sated itself in the minute. And in an absorbed stillness noonday consumed itself. And a bird sang, slender arrow. The sky shivered a wounded silver breast, the leaves moved, and grass awoke. And I knew that death was an arrow let fly from an unknown hand and in the flicker of an eye we die.
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