Few poems about death sound as cheerful as "Redbird." Its speaker is already thinking of the grave, yet nothing in the tone is mournful. She treats burial the way a gardener treats a bulb in autumn: as a pause, with spring waiting at the end of it. The central idea is that death is not an ending but a long sleep from which a small, ordinary sound can rouse us. The poem's confidence is its most striking feature, and it never explains where that confidence comes from. It simply asserts, and the assertion is hard to resist.
The opening line sets the pattern. "Bury me shallow or bury me deep" waves away the whole business of funerals and graves, because the depth of the hole makes no difference. The redbird, a cardinal, we can reasonably assume, though the poem never uses that word, will reach her either way. Notice the verb in the second line: "I shall awake." There is no "perhaps" or "I hope." The future tense is firm, almost stubborn, and the poem keeps it up to the last word. The whistle that will "pierce my sleep" is a nicely physical image. A bird's song is usually described as sweet or soft, but here it is sharp enough to get through earth and darkness, which makes it a kind of alarm clock for the dead.
The second stanza goes down into the dark and changes pace. "Deep, down deep and out of sight" repeats its key word as though the speaker were sinking, and "stirless dark" is a good coinage: no movement, no air, no time. Yet even here she is not passive. She will "follow his flashing flight / Through the lanes of eternity." The poem gives the redbird a vivid flash of colour against the blackness, and gives eternity something unexpectedly homely, lanes, as if the afterlife were a country road. Eternity is made small enough to walk through, which is part of the poem's comfort.
The last stanza brings us back above ground, and here the imagery turns sensuous and a little playful. "April drips from the window ledge" treats the month as if it were melting rain or snow, and "South Wind fashions madrigals" makes the wind a composer of old part-songs. Capitalising "South Wind" turns it into a character, a craftsman at work. Then comes the only request in the poem: "Wait for me by the lilac hedge." Until now she has addressed no one, and suddenly there is a "you," someone left behind. The instruction is tender and practical, with no wailing in it. Go and stand by the lilacs, she says, and I'll be there. The poem ends on "calls," a word that makes the redbird sound almost like a person summoning her home.
The form helps the mood. Each stanza is four lines rhyming ABAB: "deep/sleep" and "sings/springs" in the first, "sight/flight" and "me/eternity" in the second, "ledge/hedge" and "madrigals/calls" in the third. The rhymes are mostly full and easy, though "madrigals" and "calls" only half-chime, a small loosening just where the poem is about to end. The rhythm is a light, bouncing beat of about four stresses to the line, closer to a song or a nursery rhyme than to an elegy. That lightness is a choice. A heavy, slow metre would make the poem sound afraid. This one skips along, and the skip is part of the argument: if death were frightening, the verse would not dance.
The refrain-like return of the redbird in each stanza, singing, flashing, calling, gives the poem a gentle circular shape, and "returning springs" in the first stanza prepares the ending. The "thousand and one" springs is a lovely exaggeration, a number that borrows the feel of fairy tale and suggests that time, for the sleeper, hardly matters.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it faces death and refuses to flinch or to moralise. It does not argue about heaven or doubt. It trusts an everyday miracle, the return of a bird in spring, and lets that stand for resurrection. A reader who finds the claim too easy can still enjoy how neatly the poem makes it: three stanzas, one bird, and a hedge of lilac to wait beside.