by Mary Brotherton

Created on: August 02, 2009   Last Updated: August 03, 2009

One of the biggest challenges of using symbolism in fiction is to find a way to accurately tell your story in an entertaining way, while ensuring your readers don't become bogged down in the symbols. It's not a task easily achieved by all writers, but Pulitzer Prize winner, Eudora Welty proved worthy of the challenge and relied heavily on the symbols of birds throughout her short story, "A Worn Path.

The second sentence of the story begins the sequence by introducing Phoenix Jackson, an old woman who seems to have died in her own history and resurrected herself from within the ashes of hope for her grandson. Welty uses the mythological Phoenix to tell her story of dogged determination, loyalty, love and life.

Welty compared Phoenix's swaying walk to that of a grandfather clock's pendulum, but some readers might see instead, the ever-faithful Canadian Goose in her "moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. Few birds evoke the sense of awe and portray such a sense of airy grace, with its "heaviness and lightness than the Canadian goose, known for faithfulness and a monogamous lifestyle. Even the old woman's cane was compared to a single bird's chirp along the otherwise silent path.

Some of the birds mentioned in Welty's story, such as owls and bobwhites may have been simply to illustrate to the reader the nature of Phoenix's surroundings, although Welty's use of symbolism suggests otherwise. Along with the feathered creatures named, were others such as the sly fox and insignificant beetle.

Phoenix had made this trip often enough to realize there was little probability of nocturnal owls and day-foraging bobwhites converging on her path at the same time, yet she called forth these two birds specifically. The owl, long associated with wisdom, might encourage readers to wonder about the wisdom of the widowed Phoenix. Bobwhites and quails may rival the peacock for lack of natural sense to seek shelter from a summer storm, implying a similar question regarding the need for this arduous trip by such an old, frail woman.

Welty's single reference to a lone buzzard was no accident. One small, old woman faced her own mortality when she looked up to see one large, ageless scavenger of corpses.

Shortly after spying the buzzard, Phoenix was confronted by another of Welty's avian symbols: a scarecrow. Phoenix mistook the scarecrow for a man, then a mere apparition, before she recognized

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