"A Bird came Down the Walk" by Emily Dickinson and "To a Skylark" by Percy Bysshe Shelley both use the bird as a symbol of nature, with Dickinson's poetry which is a violent and sudden vision of the natural world, and Shelley's poetry is more lethargic and the bird represents a high plain to which human experiences cannot be compared. Both poems comment on man's relationship with nature, but more importantly, especially where Romantic poetry is concerned, nature can often be a metaphor for purity and the sublime; for God. Fabienne Moine states in her essay that in Romantic poetry, the speaker identifying with the bird is itself a metaphor for artistic freedom, creativity, or spiritual fulfillment”1, and 'To a Skylark' can in this light be interpreted as Shelley's (or (the speaker's) desire to transcend the earthly into something more idealized, and the melancholy that comes from the realization that one might not be able to do so. In contrast, Dickinson's poetry he comments on the violence present in the natural world, such as "bite a corner worm in half"2 which contradicts the depiction of nature found in Romantic poetry, and then the poem further describes the intrusion that humans make to the natural world .Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned" Get an Original EssayIndeed there is a kind of ironic reversal in Emily Dickinson's poetry; the silent and immobile man observes the bird as it devours the worm, then when the man moves he becomes a chaotic force and it is the bird that flies away gracefully, “softer home”3. Consider the violence depicted in the phrase “he ate the fellow raw,” as well as the worm, so is the text, raw. Here the bird is free from the moral constraints of human society, and devouring the worm is just part of the natural order, or so one might say. But there is also an element of humanization here, especially when the bird jumps “sideways from the Wall to let a beetle pass,” the way the line is written suggests a kind of courtesy, as if the natural world observed in poetry was a parallel to our human society. It highlights the pathetic fallacy and theory of attributing human traits to the natural world, which both Dickinson and Shelley's poetry do. Ryan S. Bayless expands on this concept further: “In the third stanza, the person continues to project his or her humanity onto the bird, but these attempts are now connected to the apprehension and fear of the potential danger he unconsciously perceives in nature”4. Those fears that the poetic person bestows on the bird are not unfounded, as they have just seen the bird eat a whole worm, yet the person does not seem to grasp the duality between nature and man in the way he eats the worm, yet he lets it pass cockroach, realistically the bird would only think about its own need for survival, the bird is simply a tool to comment on our human fears and the chaotic nature of existence, perhaps how precarious life is. It is common in poetry to use the pathetic fallacy, and Shelley does the same in his poem as the speaker reflects on this invisible lark, commenting on the nature of his existence and whether he has "love for his own kind"5. The meaning of much of Shelley's descriptive verse has been traced back to Shelley's uncanny sense of an ideal beauty”6 so says EW Marajum in his essay 'The Symbolism of Shelley's To A Skylark', reinforces the idea that Romantic poetry has this ideal of “transcending common experience.”7 It could be said that To A Skylark describes theman's frustration with the environment, considering the lines “You of death must believe/things truer and deeper/than we mortals dream”8 which not only elevates the Skylark to an omniscient position, but could be read as an appeal or cry against the world at large, the poet discouraged at not being able to live up to his noble preconceptions of what art should be, in fact beckons to the bird to "teach us", and always using the religious allegory, says “bird or elf”9 further indicating this ethereal nature of the animal. On a technical level, the harmonious nature of this anthem lends credence to the otherworldly aspect of the Skylark, as it flows musically, as if in sync with the song of this mythical bird. The main contrast between the two poems seems to be the way nature is described; nature in Skylark is romanticized, a land with “golden lightning” and “rainbow clouds”10 while Dickinson's vision of nature is one of uncertainty and violence, the language in the third stanza reinforces this; the “quick eyes”11, is not a calm depiction and perhaps this is an extension of human insecurities, both poems show the human need to bestow our emotions on other things, be they living or inanimate. Also interesting is the rhyme scheme and meter playing with the aforementioned idea of ​​humans disturbing the natural order, consider how in the first two stanzas the rhyme scheme is calm, the quatrain uses a xaxa rhyme scheme, "saw /raw". The hyphen in the third verse is when the bird becomes aware of the human presence, and then the rhyme scheme becomes discordant, echoing the chaos and fear that humans cause to the bird and, by extension, the natural realm as a whole . The final images of the poem "produce a deeper and more intuitive vision that completely breaks down the human egocentric tendency to impose itself on what is observed"12, it also indicates how the bird is untamed and uncontaminated by man, resists the observation of offering observer and flies away maintaining its elegance, its body "too silvered for a seam" preserving that poetic and divine description of nature's beauty. Emily Dickson's "A Bird Came Down the Walk" and Percy Shelley's "To A Skylark" both analyze similar issues of the human condition through the use of metaphor, pathetic fallacy, and personification, but the way such objects they are addressed is different, and the underlying tone is different too. Shelley adheres to the traditional Romantic sense that the beauty of the natural world is tinged with melancholy, and Emily Dickinson describes the violence of the natural world as an extension of the human one, also commenting on man's interference with nature and how the natural the world can be both violent and graceful. Percy Shelley's poetry is a traditional hymn to nature, in line with the poetic tradition and the themes of the poem; the lark as an idealized creation and as an earthly representation of the divine. Dickinson's poetry subverts structure by causing the poetic structure to echo the poem's themes, becoming more chaotic due to human intrusion. However, the bird flying away could also be a visual metaphor for the observer's inability to find "nature", or the divine, which would make it tonally and thematically closer to Shelley's poetry than at first glance, despite the contrast between violent nature and a peaceful one that the poems espouse. Man reaches out to join the ritual of the natural world, but ultimately fails to grasp it, just as the observer in Skylark is unable to witness the Skylark, but contemplates it and turns to it anyway, in this light the birds in both poems would be more