Bird
Bird - meaning Summary
Gift of the Day
Neruda's "Bird" celebrates a day experienced through birds' movement and perception. The speaker adopts an avian viewpoint, tracing how daylight, scent, and landscape pass from bird to bird. Returning from journeys, the speaker hovers between sun and land, observing human activity and natural detail from above. The poem links flight, perception, and a simple, nonverbal knowledge—an elemental literacy shared with swallows and small bright birds.
Read Complete AnalysesIt was passed from one bird to another, the whole gift of the day. The day went from flute to flute, went dressed in vegetation, in flights which opened a tunnel through the wind would pass to where birds were breaking open the dense blue air - and there, night came in. When I returned from so many journeys, I stayed suspended and green between sun and geography - I saw how wings worked, how perfumes are transmitted by feathery telegraph, and from above I saw the path, the springs and the roof tiles, the fishermen at their trades, the trousers of the foam; I saw it all from my green sky. I had no more alphabet than the swallows in their courses, the tiny, shining water of the small bird on fire which dances out of the pollen.
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