Dust of Snow
Robert Frost
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
a change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued
Be Like The Bird
Victor Hugo
Be like the bird, who
Halting in his flight
On limb too slight
Feels it give way beneath him,
Yet sings
Knowing he hath wings.
Olive Thorne Miller
Trills a wild and wondrous note,
The sweetest sound that ever stirred
A warbler’s throat.
Eben Pearson Dorr
The Jay he sings a scanty lay,
As boy who would a fiddle play,
Strikes one bar from tuneful harp,
Then screeches into discord sharp.
Though boys to task again can turn,
The bird, alas! may never learn.
Creator placed within his throat
A song that is a single note.
Yet sweet this mellow minor chord,
Prelude, perhaps it pleased the Lord
To song reserved for other shore,
Now vaguely hinted—nothing more.
Lucy Larcom
A bubble of music floats
The slope of the hillside over;
A little wandering sparrow’s notes;
And the bloom of yarrow and clover.
Do you hear me? Don’t you know
I’m the Red-eyed Vireo?
After lovely blossoming May
Entices me the livelong day—
Even when the August noon
Silences the bards of June—
My incessant voice is heard
Till I’m called The Preacher-Bird.
“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.
The Dalliance of Eagles
Walt Whitman
Skirting the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,)
Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles,
The rushing amorous contact high in space together,
The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward failing,
Till o’er the river pois’d, the twain yet one, a moment’s lull,
A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing,
Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight,
She hers, he his, pursuing.
The Oven Bird
Robert Frost
THERE is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
