A Bird Came Down The Walk Analysis

Thesis:Happiness: The authors W.E.B Du Bois, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville all explore the meaning of happiness in their stories/poems “A Bird Came down the walk”(Dickinson), “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street”(Melville), and “The Souls of Black Folk”(Du Bois), they explore the ways that happiness can be felt by different characters and how happiness can be lost with ease.

Topic sentence 1. Emily Dickinson explores the simple in appearance but complex reality of the life of a bird conveying that the bird can be content with life without the traits that seem so necessary to happiness. Emily provides the bird with human characteristics when she writes “And then hopped sidewise to the wall To let a Beetle pass -”(A Bird, came down the Walk, Dickenson 7,8) this give the bird a more relatable stance giving it emotions and thoughts that are humanistic. Because the bird is provided with these characteristics it can now feel happy and one can infer that Dickinson thinks the bird is content being a bird. The bird has achieved the highest

In “souls of Black Folk” W.E.B Du Bois explores the life of a repressed black man named John and his pursuit of knowledge, losing his joy along the way conveying that more can be less as John returns a shell of what he once was possessing more knowledge but less happiness. John and John follow a very parallel path but the difference between them is what they start with, black John having his family and nothing else and white John having wealth and power. Even though white John had more, at the start of their journey black John is much happier “always laughing and singing”(Du Bois, 4), showing how someone without wealth can be happy. After black John returns home he is not who he was when he left having gained knowledge but losing himself in the oppression and hatred tainting his ideas of what life is making him realize how his happiness is irrelevant in comparison to the troubles around the