She staked Her Feathers - Gained an Arc -

She staked Her Feathers - Gained an Arc -
Debated - Rose again -
This time - beyond the estimate
Of Envy, or of Men -

And now, among Circumference -
Her steady Boat be seen -
At home - among the Billows - As
The Bough where she was born -


     -Fr853, J798, Fascicle 38, 1864


By way of a quick introduction: my name is Tom Clyde. Over the last year I have commented frequently on the Prowling Bee (as I have made my way through the poems chronologically), so some readers may have become acquainted with me already as “Tom C.” I live in Berkeley, California. I’m married to a painter and ceramicist named Claudia Morales, and together we have four kids, ages 28, 21, 20 and 18.

When Adam asked if I would like to “guest post” on the Prowling Bee I was very honored. To my mind, this blog is the best thing the internet has going! Beats A.I. any day.

I look forward each week to meditating on a new poem, with Adam’s commentary leading the way. I cherish the poems, but also this invisible community of readers from all over the globe, pondering and questioning and commenting together.

One thing I have admired very much in Susan and Adam’s posts has been the consistently curious, open-minded and unpretentious tone of their writing. They may delve deeply into the sound and sense of a poem; they may tackle a particularly abstruse philosophical question raised in a particular line, or pause to consider the spiritual reverberations from a single word. But what the Prowling Bee never does is trap us inside a fixed interpretative frame.

Over so many years and so many poems, Susan and Adam have managed to give their readers the space — the air — to wander through the poems, down our own winding paths.

I don’t know about you, but this is how I usually do it. I read the poem, read the commentaries and readers’ comments and then go back in again, my mind now full of strange ideas, beating to rhythms not natural to it. And to my surprise, when I start the poem all over again — as I swing open that squeaky gate at the top of the post — I find the garden still fresh, the dew still in the buds.

Remember how Marianne Moore once described poetry? “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” That’s the feeling alright. Add a bee.

And that’s the magic of the approach that Susan inaugurated in 2012. It’s one that Adam has sustained so strongly. Can you believe that the two of them together, by October 2025, are approaching nearly nine hundred insightful, quizzical, provocative, emotionally vulnerable essays on Emily Dickinson’s collected poems? It’s an astonishing feat.

So that will be my humble intention too, as I set out to “guest post” on this poem, Fr853. I would like the poem to remain as fresh for you after my commentary as it was at the beginning.

Okay, introduction done. Here we go.

*

This poem, we may safely say, is a bird poem. (I wonder if any of you do this: I scrawl words in pencil next to the poems in my volume of Franklin — “Art,” “Love,” “Missing,” “Death,” “Seasons,” “Eternity,” etc. for quick reference. This one was an easy call: “Bird.”)

Read literally, this poem is about a bird taking flight.

She staked Her Feathers - Gained an Arc -
Debated - Rose again -

We recognize right away that the “she” of the opening line is a bird because she has “Feathers” and gains an “Arc.” Immediately, we see a bird trying to lift off the ground.

The first curious word of the poem, however, is “staked.” Think of the expression of “having a stake” in something. This verb choice conjures up risk-taking, perhaps even gambling.
But really it’s true, when you think about it: taking flight is a kind of gamble. Will the resistance of the air create enough lift? Will “She” make it? The dash that ends the first line leaves us in suspense.

She staked Her Feathers - Gained an Arc -

By the second line, though, we have landed back on earth. We learn that the results of that first gamble were ambiguous at best. Our bird is back on the ground, debating what to do next.

It’s interesting to take a moment to think about the physics of flight, and how this action always involves a kind of gamble, a step into the unknown. After all, a wing (also, by the way, a sail on a sailboat) does not work in the way that most people assume — that is, by pushing. Rather, a wing is actually lifting the body of the bird (just as a sail is pulling a boat forward) due to a vacuum resulting from its unique shape. The air molecules moving across the upper side of a wing — the convex side — are moving faster than those that are underneath. Those air molecules along the top are rushing to reach the end of the wing and meet up with the air molecules moving more slowly below it. This discrepancy in speed creates fewer air molecules above, and hence the vacuum which lifts the wing! So a bird, when it presses against the air, exerting its muscles, expending its hard-earned calories (thank you, worm), actually has to rely on the physics of a vacuum… an absence of air molecules… to give it lift.

Doesn’t that sound like a gamble? To trust a vacuum?

But back to the bird’s lived experience. The phrase “Gained an Arc -“ in the first line suggests only a modest pay-off for the bird’s effort. Not bad, but maybe less than was intended?

I picture that “Arc” as a mighty hop, covering two or three feet. We have all seen birds do it thousands of times in our lives and hardly noted it. (Emily is so accurate in her observations of nature that she allows us to see these daily occurrences anew.)

In the second line, however, our bird “debates” whether to go for it again.

Debated - Rose again -

Will it be worth the risk? Worth the energy expended? Apparently this debate resolves in the decision to raise the stakes on the second go. For this time she “Rose again,” but with a difference: no arc, just rising.

She is off.

This is perhaps as good a time as any to note that the meter of this poem, reflected in both stanzas, is alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter, that is, 8-6-8-6 syllables per line. Dickinson uses a classic meter found in children’s rhymes and hymns, and both stanzas, of four lines each, row along in steady iambic meter. That is, every two lines read, rhythmically:

Da-DUH, da-DUH, da-DUH, da-DUH
Da-DUH, da-DUH, da-DUH

It is a very regular and singsongy meter. Fitting for a poem about a bird.

Yet Dickinson’s sophisticated sense of sound, the play of the consonants and vowels inside those syllables, tells a more complicated story that weaves through and around this regular meter.

The hard ā in “staked” and “gained” and “debated,” for example, keeps grounding us in the lived experience of the subject; those repeated hard ā sounds are, to my ear, an auditory clue that we are back in the mind of the bird. They sound a little strained, don’t they?

Staked his feathers
Gained an arc (…but came back down)
Debated (whether to go for it again)

Poor little thing.

Interlaced with these hard ā sounds, however, we also hear the “eh” sound in “Feathers,” the generous “ah” sound of “Arc” and then the definitive openness of the “oh” in “Rose.” These softer vowel sounds constitute a counterpoint, I think, which suggests that our bird is gaining more and more as she goes for it: from eh to ah to… oh! Two things are happening simultaneously, then, in this first stanza: the ā of effort and the eh-ah-oh progression of results.

Additionally, doesn’t “Rose again” suggest, subliminally, a kind of blooming, the unseen presence of flowers, maybe even a rose? The fluidity of these two words, “Rose” and “again” together (roseagain, James Joyce would have written it) conveys a sense of ease and triumph at the end of that second line.

This triumph of taking flight, this “Rose again,” brings to my mind the turnaround at the end of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29.

There, the poet is wracked with shame and self-pity. We might say he can hardly even manage a hop:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate…

But after nearly succumbing to despair, the poet’s thoughts lift like a bird:

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate…

“Heaven’s gate.” In Emily’s language might not this be translated as “Circumference”?

And there’s even another reference Emily tucks into these words “Rose again.” Of course there is the association with the resurrection of Christ.

Nothing in Dickinson’s poetry is accidental, and I believe that choosing these specific words here she is deftly merging the flight of the single bird with the possible redemption of a human life. In other words, the bird may be more than a bird here. And the rising may be more than merely resisting gravity.

All this puts us in an elevated state, one might even say a state of grace, and we are only two lines in!

Let’s see where Dickinson takes us from here:

She staked Her Feathers - Gained an Arc -
Debated - Rose again -
This time - beyond the estimate
Of Envy, or of Men -

We notice right away, reading the stanza as whole, that we have a rhyme of “again” with “men.” But we have more than that. We also have a return of the “eh” sound in “estimate,” “Envy,” and “Men.”

So there is another musical and rhythmic through-line in this opening stanza: f(ea)thers… ag(ai)n… (e)timate… (en)vy… m(e)n. Even after our bird has taken a risk and achieved flight, we continue to hear the pulse of this “eh” sound. Is this to suggest the steady pulse in the little bird’s blood? Or does this “eh”possibly indicate the continuity of consciousness — that resilient animal consciousness that lies behind the hard ā staking and debating part of the bird?

Now let’s try to make sense of the last two lines of the first stanza:

This time - beyond the estimate
Of Envy, or of Men -

Our bird, our subject, has moved, with this latest gamble, quite beyond the estimate of “Envy, or of Men.” I read these lines to suggest that taking flight is so extraordinary, so outside of our common experience, that the usual responses we might have to it — of comparison and competition (“of Envy”), or even of sympathy and identification (“of Men”) are simply not available to us. The bird is most decidedly not where — or even what — she once was. She is transformed. She may be outside of our powers of description even.

That is the challenge of the rest of the poem.

So this first stanza feels liberating and exhilarating to me. It is certainly action-packed. We started with something very earthbound: feathers. Greasy, fragrant, inescapably particular. Our bird “staked” them, twice actually, and now she is… already… “beyond the estimate”!

Dickinson has a wonderful early poem, F68, which hints at the scale of her youthful ambition as a poet. The final stanza reads:

There are that resting, rise.
Can I expound the skies?
How still the Riddle lies.

Now in this seemingly innocuous bird poem (nearly 800 poems later), Dickinson seems to be doing exactly what she aspired to do as a young poet. She is expounding the skies. What is resting, we see rise.

So let’s go to the next and final stanza.

And now, among Circumference -
Her steady Boat be seen -
At home - among the Billows - As
The Bough where she was born -

Ah, that cosmos-facing word, “Circumference”!

Dickinson uses it in many different ways, as elucidated in this essay on the blog, White Heat: Emily Dickinson in 1862 (July 16-22, 1862: Poems on Circumference – White Heat). 

But one of the ways she uses this word, circumference, is to indicate those places where she reaches the very limits of intelligible language and comprehension. In one poem (F633) she describes herself, the poet, as venturing “out upon Circumference”. The final stanza of that poem reads:

I touched the Universe —
And back it slid - and I alone -
A Speck upon a Ball -
Went out upon Circumference -
Beyond the Dip of Bell -

In other words, the circumference lies beyond the dip of wedding bells, funeral bells, organized religion, conventional modes of experience, at the very edges of meaning.

Our bird, also a female like the poet, has staked, and debated, and finally taken flight. Note that when she takes flight in this second stanza of the poem she moves into present tense.

And now, among Circumference -

“And now,” it begins.

The bird/poet has flown, is flying, outside of estimate, sure. More than that, though, she is flying at the very farthest ring of comprehension.

Yet her steady body, her vessel, her “Boat,” can be seen (by whom?) very much in its element, “home” in fact, even in this liminal place.

This, then, is a true adventure into the unknown. It reminds me of the tales of classical heroes like Odysseus and Aeneas visiting the Underworld.

So they wander over the endless fields of air,
Gazing at every region, viewing realm by realm.

— The Aeneid, Book VI, p. 211 Robert Fagles translation (Penguin Classics, 2006)

There is no safety here. Everything is distorted as if in a dream.

How still the Riddle lies.

And yet the hero in these epic tales retains his body — still mortal, intact — despite his journey to an unknown, even unknowable realm. So does the bird in this poem retain her identity, even if “beyond the estimate / Of Envy, or of Men.”

Her steady Boat be seen -
At home - among the Billows - As
The Bough where she was born -

Somehow, Dickinson has it, the adventurer — bird, poet, or… reader? — is at home among the tremulous “Billows.” She is just as at home as she was on the “Bough,” that is, in the nest where she was born. This is a high achievement.

It is an epic adventure, but also Dickinson shows us, an everyday occurrence. We see this achievement, remarkably — Emily directs our attention to it — whenever we witness a bird taking flight and vanishing into the clouds. The elegance of its wings moving through the air indicates that it is still “at home” even now. Grown, independent, but at home as much as when it was a baby.

So we see how this poem begins to reveal its non-literal meaning. It presents a metaphor for the grown artist that Emily has become.

I would suggest that it also works as metaphor for each of us, her future readers. For in our lives we too “stake” our feathers (our inimitable personalities, our talents, our efforts) every day. Many times we merely gain an arc. And then we have a decision to make: keep trying?

When we did keep trying, sometimes, we discover that we rise again and stay aloft, just like this bird. Perhaps an internship becomes a full-time job. Or an on-again, off-again relationship grows into a loving and committed marriage. Or a break from a judgmental parent forges a new and lasting identity. Whatever the form of flight, we feel as at home in this new present-tense experience as we did long ago in the nest.

The last feature of this poem that I want to mention before I close is perhaps my favorite. It strikes me as pure Emily, and emblematic of her genius. That is the repeated “b—“ sound in this final stanza.

“Boat” becomes…“Billows” becomes… “Bough” becomes… “born.”

Do these “b”s not suggest the beating of wings? They do to me. Read the stanza as a whole and hear it.

Her steady Boat be seen -
At home - among the Billows - As
The Bough where she was born -

Wow. Wings or not, they certainly add a feeling of quickening to the iambic meter. They hit on the 4th beat of one line, the 6th of the next, then the 2nd and the 6th again in the final line, as if gathering speed.

So, yes, this poem is a bird poem. It is also about life and chances. About high stakes and growing up and the edges of the possible. In other words, it seems to me, it is about what it feels like to be alive.

It turns out I could have scrawled all those other words next to it in my Franklin edition too — “Art,” “Love,” “Missing,” “Death,” “Seasons,” “Eternity”… We can stick with “Bird” for easy reference. But it’s amazing to know how much Dickinson discovers inside that little feathered body!

A snowy egret staking its feathers on October 23, 2025,

at Abbotts Lagoon in the Point Reyes National Seashore.