Can anyone explain To a Waterfowl by William Byrant?

Question

Can anyone explain To a Waterfowl by William Byrant?
heres a link http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/Bryan...

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/Bryant/waterfowl.html

Answer 1

Double check the link.

Upon clicking, this is what one encounters:
Page not found

OK. Read this closely:

The speaker of "To a Waterfowl" is inspired after watching a water bird flying high in the sky, an irony revealing mysterious Divine guidance.
William Cullen Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl” consists of eight four-line stanzas. The rime scheme is ABAB CDCD, EFEF, etc. The lines have variable rhythms with the second and third lines longer than the first and fourth.

First Stanza – Where are you going?
In the first stanza, the speaker addresses the bird, asking him where he is going. But he breaks the question in two to describe the atmosphere through which the bird is flying: dew is forming and the sun is setting, as the bird flies “through their rosy depths.”

Second Stanza – A hunter might try to shoot you
The speaker then notes that some hunter might have his eye on the bird and try to kill it. He dramatizes the bird’s flight by contrasting it against the sky: the bird’s body is “darkly painted on the crimson sky” which would make an easy target for that “fowler’s eye.”

Third Stanza – Lake, river, or ocean
The third stanza again consists of a question addressed to the bird. The speaker simply asks the fowl if he is flying to a lake, river, or ocean. The bodies of water are important for two reasons: the bird is, after all, a “water” bird, and by framing the question to move from smallest body of water to largest, the speaker is demonstrating that the bird is now taking on a metaphoric significance for the speaker that will develop further as he continues to muse about this bird’s flight.

Fourth Stanza – “There is a Power”
The speaker asserts that this lone bird is being guided by an invisible Power that “Teaches thy way along the pathless coast.” Here the speaker extends the metaphor begun in the third stanza that the bird is not just aimlessly wandering but is being infallibly guided by that Power, and even though this bird is alone, while such birds usually form v-shapes with other birds as they traverse the heavens, he is “not lost.”

Fifth Stanza – “All day thy wings have fann’d”
With the fifth stanza, we know that the speaker’s musing on the bird’s flight has turned metaphorical. When he says, “All day thy wings have fann'd / At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere: / Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, / Though the dark night is near,” we see that “day” is a metaphor or “life” and “night” is a metaphor for “death.” The exaggeration about the bird’s having fanned his wings “all day” alerts us that the speaker is now metaphorically comparing the bird’s flight to life, death, and guidance by a Power.

Sixth Stanza – “And soon that toil shall end”
The speaker then metaphorically asserts that the bird will soon arrive at its present destination, and simultaneously the speaker alludes to the more permanent end. By referring to the bird’s single flight as “toil” again would be mere exaggeration, unless the speaker was metaphorically referring to his death as well.

Seventh Stanza – Heaven has swallowed the bird’s form
Suddenly, the bird has vanished from the speaker’s sight “swallowed up” by “the abyss of heaven.” But even though the bird’s form has vanished from his sight, the speaker will remember what the sight of the bird taught him, what the sight of the flight motivated him to understand about life, death, and the Power that guides them.

Eighth Stanza – That Power will lead me also
The speaker’s revelation in the eighth stanza might be heralded as an epiphany: that Power now called “He,” or God, who fetched that lone bird through the darkening sky to his ultimate destination, is the same Power that will guide and guard the speaker through his own path through life.