You like sure things, Shmoopers? Great. Well, we can guarantee that, at some point in this life, you'll encounter change (and not the happy, loose coin kind). Maybe you will start attending a new school, take a new job, move to a new city, or wake up one day to discover that all of your closest friends have gotten married and moved to the suburbs. Change: it's going to happen, Shmoopers. And when it does, we can 100% also guarantee that this will be one of the more unpleasant times in your life. You will feel lost, alone, adrift, confused, and perhaps many other un-fun things. It's just an inevitable part of life—everybody goes through it at one point or another. It's possible that it may not be this dramatic, or perhaps the change is so radical that this feeling lasts for years and years.

Don't freak out just yet, though. This is where our new friend William Cullen Bryant comes in. He understood this feeling all too well. Better than that, he actually came up with a solution. Okay, he came up with a kind of solution, or at least a way of trying to cope with that feeling. On the surface, "To a Waterfowl" seems like just a poem about, well, a waterfowl, but near the middle things start to shift in a different direction. The waterfowl appears to be floating, following no specific path, until the speaker realizes that a mysterious, spiritual "Power" is guiding it.

It is this realization about the waterfowl that ultimately brings the speaker the comfort he knows he will need in the future. This is the comfort that all of us need when we feel alone, lost, adrift, and confused. The speaker knows he's going to experience that feeling at some point, but he's also confident that the same power that guides the waterfowl will also be there to guide him in his time of greatest need. Even if he (the speaker) can't see the path he must tread—things may appear "pathless," in the words of the poem—he can rest assured that things will be okay. This is the "lesson" of the waterfowl that will remain "deeply" etched in his heart, and it makes our speaker feel tons better. We're willing to bet that, if you keep this poem in the back of your mind, you can break it in a time of need to make you feel tons better, too.