Summarize the poem ‘Unaware' in your own words in about 100 words.
Answers
A Bird, came down the Walk’ is a five stanza poem that is separated into sets of five lines. As was common within Dickinson’s works, she uses quatrains, or sets of four lines to structure the piece. One will also immediately take note of her characteristic capitalizations and dashes, over which literary scholars are divided. In this particular poem, the dashes only appear at the ends of the lines. This might have been done to elongate a pause before a reader moves to the next line.
In regards to meter, the poem conforms to iambic trimeter. This means that each line contains three sets of two beats. The first of these is unstressed and the second stressed. The rhyme scheme is a bit looser. There is almost a pattern of ABCB, if not for a few half or slant rhymes, such as that which appears in stanza three.
The poem begins with the speaker describing a bird she sees. She is close by, making it so that she can look at the bird, but it does not immediately notice her. From where she is situated, she sees the bird pick up an “Angle Worm” and bite it in half. It moves quickly from place to place, showing the anxiety inherent to most of its species. It knows the dangers presented by the much larger and stronger world.