In “A Bird, came down the Walk -,” Emily Dickinson uses a variety of literary devices, like personification, metaphor, simile, and vivid imagery, to create a beautiful little meditation on the division between human beings and the natural world. Let's look at some of these devices in more detail.

Dickinson employs personification with regard to the bird, the worm, and the beetle. She gives these creatures, especially the bird, human characteristics. The bird has his meal and gets a drink of water, hops to the wall, and allows a beetle to pass. The meal is an angleworm, which the poet calls a “fellow,” and the beetle seems to be on business of his own.

The bird is nervous. His eyes look “like frightened Beads” (notice the simile), and he has a “Velvet Head” (a lovely metaphor). Look, too, at the metaphors the poet uses for the bird's flight. He unrolls his feathers. Then it is like he is rowing with oars that divide the ocean, or swimming through the air, like butterflies “off Banks of Noon." This last stanza is extremely vivid in its imagery, and we can easily picture the ocean and the butterflies in their dance.