To a Waterfowl Man and the Natural World

The poem's opening lines are filled with references to nature: dew, the heavens (sky), the "rosy depths" of day (the sun). "To a Waterfowl" presents itself as a poem about nature, about the transitions that take place in nature (from dry to wet, from day to night). These foreshadow the impending transition in the speaker's perspective.

Very early on, the speaker starts flirting with images of death. Here the "crimson sky," for example, both describes the deep shade of red that characterizes the sky, but also makes us think of blood and death (it certainly doesn't help that there's a "fowler"—i.e., a bird hunter—in here).

This might just be the most "natural" stanza in the entire poem. The entire thing is devoted to nature, and nature alone: rivers, lakes, the ocean, and the waterfowl. The speaker, the fowler, and any other people are completely absent.

Time and time again, the speaker confronts the vastness of the natural world. The sky here is "pathless," a "desert," an "illimitable" space. Try looking up at the sky sometime and mapping it, and you'll get an idea of how the speaker feels here.

The waterfowl models the kind of endurance that we sense the speaker lacks. He flaps his wings for an entire day, despite how cold the air is, despite the fact that night is near, and despite the fact that there is a very "welcome" place to go (the "land").

These lines recall other "darker" lines in the poem (such as the description of the "cold, thin atmosphere"). Like those, these too paint a very dark picture of nature: the sky is an "abyss" that can monstrously swallow things. Sure, this is a metaphor, but it's still deeply unsettling.