Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View
The speaker is a first-person narrator. She is depicted as being frightened of the bird she is observing. She makes careful note of each small action the bird takes.
Form and Meter
The poem is five stanzas long and is made up of quatrains. The first three stanzas have rhyming second and fourth lines, while the fourth and fifth stanzas follow the same pattern but have slant rhyme. The lines alternate between iambic trimeter and tetrameter.
Metaphors and Similes
The bird is compared to a rowboat moving smoothly across water and butterflies drifting through the afternoon air. Both of these metaphors portray the bird as graceful and poised.
Alliteration and Assonance
Alliteration is present in the O sounds of the line "Than Oars divide the Ocean," the S sounds in "Too silver for a seam," the D sounds in "And then, he drank a Dew" and the B sounds of "Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon."
Irony
N/A
Genre
Nature poetry
Setting
The poem is set in the countryside, likely in a grassy field.
Tone
Curious and cautious
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is the speaker and the antagonist is the bird. This dynamic becomes more complex as the poem continues.
Major Conflict
The protagonist is frightened of the bird and struggles to understand what its true nature is.
Climax
The climax of the poem comes when the speaker offers the bird a crumb and flies away from her.
Foreshadowing
N/A
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
The term "Angle Worm" refers to a type of worm used for bait fishing.
Metonymy and Synecdoche
N/A
Personification
The worm in the poem's opening is personified with the use of the word "fellow." The bird is personified throughout by the speaker's use of the pronoun "he" in place of "it."
Hyperbole
The poem's opening is hyperbolic. It shows the bird eating a worm, but the speaker describes it with such visceral detail that it reads like a violent crime.
Onomatopoeia
N/A
