A Bird Came Down

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, splashless, as they swim.

by Emily Dickinson
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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Though virtually unknown in her lifetime, Dickinson has come to be regarded, along with Walt Whitman, as one of the two quintessential American poets of the 19th century. In fact, it is commonly conjectured that Contemporary North American Poetry extends outward along two principal currents, that which flows from Whitman and that which flows from Dickinson. Curiously enough, the two poets are almost opposite in personality, prosody, poetic manifesto and style.
Dickinson lived an introverted and hermetic life, which has inspired numerous biographers and voluminous speculation, mostly about her sexuality, of which little is definitively known. Although she wrote, at latest count, 1789 poems, only a handful of them were published during her lifetime, all anonymously and probably without her knowledge.