Ten - nine - eight - seven - six - five - four - three - two - one…
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Well…it’s a new year of sorts, a new year of daily Dickinson posts!
I started with my first post on CounterSocial back in November 2022, and the initial post centered on Dickinson’s love of birds – and how she referred to them as “nature’s little poets.”
Of course, this is post number 965, and three years later should put me at about 1,100, but the discrepancy is due to my travels; since I don’t hit the road with all my Dickinson references, I always put my daily posts on pause.
[NOTE: This plog (poetry blog) on this site, TheDickinson-dot-net, dates back to 2013. Later, in 2022, I deleted my Twitter account when Melon Husk took over, and allowed for the proliferation of hate speech and disinformation, and I joined Counter Social --- and that's where I began my current series of #DickinsonDaily posts. I also now post them on Tumblr and Substack -- as of this past February.]
Here we are three years later, so let’s return to Dickinson’s love of birds.
Dickinson used the word “bird” in 148 poems, and of course, she mentioned specific birds in many of her poems. Which was her favorite? Any guesses?
Some birds never made the cut. There are no poems which use the words “canary,” “chickadee,” “chicken,” “crane,” “duck,” “egret,” “Finch,” “gull,” “hawk,” “heron,” “ibis,” “parrot,” “pigeon,” “raven,” “starling,” “stork,” “turkey,” or “woodpecker.”
However, in the case of “woodpecker,” she never used the word, but wrote a poem about the bird. Mabel Loomis Todd titled this poem “The Woodpecker” when she published it in the third series of Dickinson’s “Poems” in 1896:
His Bill an Auger is
His Head, a Cap and Frill
He laboreth at every Tree
A Worm, His utmost Goal.
What birds did “make the cut”? Here are birds in Dickinson’s poems, and the number of poems in which they appear:
Blackbird: 1
Peacock: 1
Whippoorwill: 1
Cardinal: 2
Dove: 2
Eagle: 2
Owl: 2
Vulture: 2
Wren: 2
Hummingbird: 3
Swan: 3
Oriole: 4
Lark: 5
Crow: 6
Sparrow: 7
Jay: 8
| Bobolink: 13 And… Well, before I get to the top bird, two things: (a) Did I leave out any common bird name? (b) There are other bird poems that don’t mention specific bird names. For example, “A Route of Evanescence” is about a hummingbird, but it never mentions the bird by name. |  |
Okay, so what bird takes top honors as the avian most often mentioned in the poetry of Emily Dickinson?
Appearing in 31 poems, “The Robin is the one!”
Appearing in 31 poems, “The Robin is the one!”
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