Anxiety's role in "The Woodpile"

Lisa Hinrichson discusses anxiety's role in "The Woodpile" in this quote from her essay. “The measured step through the snow in the opening of “The Wood-Pile” serves to emphasize the balanced prepositions of the first line of the poem (“Out walking in”). This tension between order and disorder is keenly felt in “The Wood-Pile,” both in terms of the spatial order of the poem and the speaker’s unsteady emotional balancing.”  An example of the “unsteady emotional balancing” can be found in lines 7-10 of the poem, where the speaker describes the woods as follows, “Too much alike to mark or name a place by / So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.” The speaker here is clearly experiencing anxiety from the unfamiliar uniformity of his surroundings, however, the anxiety the speaker is feeling from the surroundings changes fundamentally with the introduction of the bird in Line 11.  The speaker projects his neuroticism onto the bird, and personifies it by imagining that the bird is attempting to defend a particular feather from the speaker.  By projecting the anxiety and fear onto the bird, it frees the speaker from anxiety in the following lines when the bird flies away, changing the tone of the speaker.(Hinrichson)