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Context

Emily Dickinson led one of the most prosaic lives of any great poet. At a time

when fellow poet Walt Whitman was ministering to the Civil War wounded andtraveling across America—a time when America itself was reeling in the

chaos of war, the tragedy of the Lincoln assassination, and the turmoil of

Reconstruction—Dickinson lived a relatively untroubled life in her father’s

house in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she was born in 1830 and where

she died in 1886. Although popular myth often depicts Dickinson as the

solitary genius, she, in fact, remained relatively active in Amherst social

circles and often entertained visitors throughout her life. However, she was

certainly more isolated than a poet such as Whitman: Her world was bounded

by her home and its surrounding countryside; the great events of her day play

little role in her poetry. Whitman eulogized Lincoln and wrote about the war;

Dickinson, one of the great poets of inwardness ever to write in English, was

no social poet—one could read through her Collected Poems—1,776 in all—

and emerge with almost no sense of the time in which she lived. Of course,

social and historical ideas and values contributed in shaping her character,

but Emily Dickinson’s ultimate context is herself, the milieu of her mind.

Dickinson is simply unlike any other poet; her compact, forceful language,

characterized formally by long disruptive dashes, heavy iambic meters, and

angular, imprecise rhymes, is one of the singular literary achievements of the

nineteenth century. Her aphoristic style, whereby substantial meanings are

compressed into very few words, can be daunting, but many of her best and

most famous poems are comprehensible even on the first reading. During her

lifetime, Dickinson published hardly any of her massive poetic output (fewer

than ten of her nearly 1,800 poems) and was utterly unknown as a writer.

After Dickinson’s death, her sister discovered her notebooks and published

the contents, thus, presenting America with a tremendous poetic legacy that

appeared fully formed and without any warning. As a result, Dickinson hastended to occupy a rather uneasy place in the canon of American poetry;

writers and critics have not always known what to make of her. Today, her

place as one of the two finest American poets of the nineteenth century is

secure: Along with Whitman, she literally defines the very era that had so little

palpable impact on her poetry.

Analysis

Emily Dickinson is such a unique poet that it is very difficult to place her in any

single tradition—she seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.



Her poetic form, with her customary four-line stanzas, ABCB rhyme schemes,

and alternations in iambic meter between tetrameter and trimeter, is derived

from Psalms and Protestant hymns, but Dickinson so thoroughly appropriates

the forms—interposing her own long, rhythmic dashes designed to interruptthe meter and indicate short pauses—that the resemblance seems quite faint.

Her subjects are often parts of the topography of her own psyche; she

explores her own feelings with painstaking and often painful honesty but

never loses sight of their universal poetic application; one of her greatest

techniques is to write about the particulars of her own emotions in a kind of

universal homiletic or adage-like tone (“After great pain, a formal feeling

comes”) that seems to describe the reader’s mind as well as it does the

poet’s. Dickinson is not a “philosophical poet”; unlike Wordsworth or Yeats,

she makes no effort to organize her thoughts and feelings into a coherent,

unified worldview. Rather, her poems simply record thoughts and feelings

experienced naturally over the course of a lifetime devoted to reflection and

creativity: the powerful mind represented in these records is by turns

astonishing, compelling, moving, and thought-provoking, and emerges much

more vividly than if Dickinson had orchestrated her work according to a

preconceived philosophical system.

Of course, Dickinson’s greatest achievement as a poet of inwardness is her brilliant, diamond-hard language. Dickinson often writes aphoristically,

meaning that she compresses a great deal of meaning into a very small

number of words. This can make her poems hard to understand on a first

reading, but when their meaning does unveil itself, it often explodes in the

mind all at once, and lines that seemed baffling can become intensely and

unforgettably clear. Other poems—many of her most famous, in fact—are

much less difficult to understand, and they exhibit her extraordinary powers of

observation and description. Dickinson’s imagination can lead her into very

peculiar territory—some of her most famous poems are bizarre death-

fantasies and astonishing metaphorical conceits—but she is equally deft in

her navigation of the domestic, writing beautiful nature-lyrics alongside her

wild flights of imagination and often combining the two with great facility.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

The Individual’s Struggle with God



Dickinson devoted a great amount of her work to exploring the relationship

between an individual and a Judeo-Christian God. Many poems describe a

protracted rebellion against the God whom she deemed scornful and

indifferent to human suffering, a divine being perpetually committed tosubjugating human identity. In a sense, she was a religious poet. Unlike other

religious poets, who inevitably saw themselves as subordinate to God,

Dickinson rejected this premise in her poetry. She was dissatisfied with the

notion that the poet can engage with God only insofar as God ordains the

poet as his instrument, and she challenged God’s dominion throughout her

life, refusing to submit to his divine will at the cost of her self. Perhaps her

most fiery challenge comes in “Mine by the Right of the White Election!”

(528), in which the speaker roars in revolt against God, claiming the earth

and heavens for herself or himself.

Elsewhere, Dickinson’s poetry criticizes God not by speaking out directly

against him, but by detailing the suffering he causes and his various affronts

to an individual’s sense of self. Though the speaker of “Tell all the Truth but

tell it slant” (1129) never mentions God, the poem refers obliquely to his

suppression of the apostle Paul in the last two lines. Here, the speaker

describes how unmitigated truth (in the form of light) causes blindness. In the

Bible (Acts 9:4), God decides to enlighten Paul by making him blind and then

healing him on the condition that thenceforth Paul becomes “a chosen vessel”of God, performing his will. The speaker recoils from this instance of God’s

juggernaut-like domination of Paul in this poem but follows the poem’s advice

and tells the truth “slant,” or indirectly, rather than censuring God directly. In

another instance of implicit criticism, Dickinson portrays God as a murderous

hunter of man in “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” (754), in which Death

goes about gleefully executing people for his divine master. These poems are

among the hundreds of verses in which Dickinson portrays God as aloof,

cruel, invasive, insensitive, or vindictive.

The Assertion of the Self

In her work, Dickinson asserts the importance of the self, a theme closely

related to Dickinson’s censure of God. As Dickinson understood it, the mere

act of speaking or writing is an affirmation of the will, and the call of the poet,

in particular, is the call to explore and express the self to others. For

Dickinson, the “self” entails an understanding of identity according to the way

it systematizes its perceptions of the world, forms its goals and values, and

comes to judgments regarding what it perceives.



Nearly all Dickinson’s speakers behave according to the primacy of the self,

despite the efforts of others to intrude on them. Indeed, the self is never more

apparent in Dickinson’s poetry than when the speaker brandishes it against

some potentially violating force. In “They shut me up in Prose—” (613), thespeaker taunts her captives, who have imprisoned her body but not her mind,

which remains free and roaming. Because God most often plays the role of

culprit as an omnipotent being, he can and does impose compromising

conditions upon individuals according to his whim in Dickinson’s work. Against

this power, the self is essentially defined. The individual is subject to any

amount of suffering, but so long as he or she remains a sovereign self, he or

she still has that which separates him or her from other animate and

inanimate beings.

The Power of Words and Poetry

Though Dickinson sequestered herself in Amherst for most of her life, she

was quite attuned to the modern trends of thought that circulated throughout

Europe and North America. Perhaps the most important of these was Charles

Darwin’s theory of evolution, published in 1859. Besides the tidal wave it

unleashed in the scientific community, evolution throttled the notion of a world

created by God’s grand design. For Dickinson, who renounced obedience to

God through the steps of her own mental evolution, this development only

reinforced the opposition to the belief in a transcendent and divine design in

an increasingly secularized world.

Dickinson began to see language and the word, which were formerly part of

God’s domain, as the province of the poet. The duty of the poet was to re-

create, through words, a sense of the world as a place in which objects have

an essential and almost mythic relationship to each other. Dickinson’s poems

often link abstract entities to physical things in an attempt to embrace or

create an integral design in the world. This act is most apparent in her poems

of definition, such as “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—” (254) or “Hope is asubtle Glutton” (1547). In these poems, Dickinson employs metaphors that

assign physical qualities to the abstract feeling of “hope” in order to flesh out

the nature of the word and what it means to human consciousness.

Nature as a “Haunted House”

In a letter to a friend, Dickinson once wrote: ‘Nature is a Haunted House—but

Art—a House that tries to be haunted.” The first part of the sentence implies

that the natural world is replete with mystery and false signs, which deceive

humankind as to the purpose of things in nature as well as to God’s purpose



in the creation of nature. The sentence’s second part reveals the poet’s role.

The poet does not exist merely to render aspects of nature, but rather to

ascertain the character of God’s power in the world.

For Dickinson, however, the characterizing of God’s power proved to be

complicated since she often abstained from using the established

religioussymbols for things in nature. This abstention is most evident in

Dickinson’s poem about a snake, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (986), in

which Dickinson refrains from the easy reference to Satan in Eden. Indeed, in

many of her nature poems, such as “A Bird came down the Walk” (328),

Dickinson ultimately insists on depicting nature as unapologetically

incomprehensible, and thus haunted.

Motifs

The Speaker’s Unique Poetic Voice

Dickinson’s speakers are numerous and varied, but each exhibits a similar

voice, or distinctive tone and style. Poets create speakers to literally speak

their poems; while these speakers might share traits with their creators or

might be based on real historical figures, ultimately they are fictional entities

distinct from their writers. Frequently, Dickinson employs the first person,

which lends her poems the immediacy of a dialogue between two people, thespeaker and the reader. She sometimes aligns multiple speakers in one poem

with the use of the plural personal pronoun we. The first-person singular and

plural allow Dickinson to write about specific experiences in the world: her

speakers convey distinct, subjective emotions and individual thoughts rather

than objective, concrete truths. Readers are thus invited to compare their

experiences, emotions, and thoughts with those expressed in Dickinson’s

lyrics. By emphasizing the subjectivity, or individuality, of experience,

Dickinson rails against those educational and religious institutions that attempt

to limit individual knowledge and experience.

The Connection Between Sight and Self

For Dickinson, seeing is a form of individual power. Sight requires that the

seer have the authority to associate with the world around her or him in

meaningful ways and the sovereignty to act based on what she or he believes

exists as opposed to what another entity dictates. In this sense, sight

becomes an important expression of the self, and consequently the speakers

in Dickinson’s poems value it highly. The horror that the speaker of “I heard a

Fly buzz—when I died—” (465) experiences is attributable to her loss of



eyesight in the moments leading up to her death. The final utterance, “I could

not see to see” (16), points to the fact that the last gasp of life, and thus of

selfhood, is concentrated on the desire to “see” more than anything else. In

this poem, sight and self are so synonymous that the end of one (blindness)translates into the end of the other (death).

In other poems, sight and self seem literally fused, a connection that

Dickinson toys with by playing on the sonic similarity of the words I and eye.

This wordplay abounds in Dickinson’s body of work. It is used especially

effectively in the thirdstanza of “The Soul selects her own Society—” (303), in

which the speaker declares that she knows the soul, or the self. She

commands the soul to choose one person from a great number of people and

then “close the lids” of attention. In this poem, the “I” that is the soul has

eyelike properties: closing the lids, an act that would prevent seeing, is

tantamount to cutting off the “I” from the rest of society.

Symbols

Feet

Feet enter Dickinson’s poems self-referentially, since the

words foot and feet denote poetic terms as well as body parts. In poetry, “feet”

are the groups of syllables in a line that form a metrical unit. Dickinson’s

mention of feet in her poems generally serves the dual task of describingfunctioning body parts and commenting on poetry itself. Thus, when the

speaker of “A narrow Fellow in the Grass” (986) remembers himself a

“Barefoot” boy (11), he indirectly alludes to a time when his sense of poetry

was not fully formed. Likewise, when the speaker of “After great pain, a formal

feeling comes” (341) notes that feet are going around in his head while he is

going mad, he points to the fact that his ability to make poetry is

compromised.

Stone

In Dickinson’s poems, stones represent immutability and finality: unlike

flowers or the light of day, stones remain essentially unchanged. The speaker

in “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” (216) imagines the dead lying

unaffected by the breezes of nature—and of life. After the speaker chooses

her soul in “The Soul selects her own Society—” (303), she shuts her eyes

“Like Stone—” (12), firmly closing herself off from sensory perception or

society. A stone becomes an object of envy in “How happy is the little Stone”

(1510), a poem in which the speaker longs for the rootless independence of a

stone bumping along, free from human cares.



Birds

Dickinson uses the symbol of birds rather flexibly. In “A Bird came down the

Walk” (328), the bird becomes an emblem of the unyielding mystery of

nature, while in “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers” (254), the bird becomes

a personification of hope. Elsewhere, Dickinson links birds to poets, whose

job is to sing whether or not people hear. In “Split—the Lark—and you’ll find

the Music” (861), Dickinson compares the sounds of birds to the lyrical

sounds of poetry; the poem concludes by asking rhetorically whether its

listeners now understand the truths produced by both birds and poetry. Like

nature, symbolized by the bird, art produces soothing, truthful sounds.

“Success is counted sweetest...”

Summary

The speaker says that “those who ne’er succeed” place the highest value on

success. (They “count” it “sweetest”.) To understand the value of a nectar, the

speaker says, one must feel “sorest need.” She says that the members of the

victorious army (“the purple Host / Who took the flag today”) are not able to

define victory as well as the defeated, dying man who hears from a distance

the music of the victors.

Form

The three stanzas of this poem take the form of iambic trimeter—with the

exception of the first two lines of the second stanza, which add a fourth stress

at the end of the line. (Virtually all of Dickinson’s poems are written in an

iambic meter that fluctuates fluidly between three and four stresses.) As in

most of Dickinson’s poems, the stanzas here rhyme according to an ABCB

scheme, so that the second and fourth lines in each stanza constitute the

stanza’s only rhyme.

Commentary

Many of Emily Dickinson’s most famous lyrics take the form of homilies, or

short moral sayings, which appear quite simple but that actually describe

complicated moral and psychological truths. “Success is counted sweetest” is

such a poem; its first two lines express its homiletic point, that “Success is

counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed” (or, more generally, that

people tend to desire things more acutely when they do not have them). The



subsequent lines then develop that axiomatic truth by offering a pair of images

that exemplify it: the nectar—a symbol of triumph, luxury, “success”—can best

be comprehended by someone who “needs” it; the defeated, dying man

understands victory more clearly than the victorious army does. The poemexhibits Dickinson’s keen awareness of the complicated truths of human

desire (in a later poem on a similar theme, she wrote that “Hunger—was a

way / Of Persons outside Windows— / The Entering—takes away—”), and it

shows the beginnings of her terse, compacted style, whereby complicated

meanings are compressed into extremely short phrases (e.g., “On whose

forbidden ear”).

“ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—...”

Summary

The speaker describes hope as a bird (“the thing with feathers”) that perches

in the soul. There, it sings wordlessly and without pause. The song of hope

sounds sweetest “in the Gale,” and it would require a terrifying storm to ever

“abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm.” The speaker says that she

has heard the bird of hope “in the chillest land— / And on the strangest Sea

—”, but never, no matter how extreme the conditions, did it ever ask for a

single crumb from her.

Form

Like almost all of Dickinson’s poems, “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—...”

takes the form of an iambic trimeter that often expands to include a fourth

stress at the end of the line (as in “And sings the tune without the words—”).

Like almost all of her poems, it modifies and breaks up the rhythmic flow with

long dashes indicating breaks and pauses (“And never stops—at all—”). The

stanzas, as in most of Dickinson’s lyrics, rhyme loosely in an ABCB scheme,

though in this poem there are some incidental carryover rhymes: “words” in

line three of the first stanza rhymes with “heard” and “Bird” in the second;

“Extremity” rhymes with “Sea” and “Me” in the third stanza, thus, technically

conforming to an ABBB rhyme scheme.

Commentary

This simple, metaphorical description of hope as a bird singing in the soul is

another example of Dickinson’s homiletic style, derived from Psalms and



religious hymns. Dickinson introduces her metaphor in the first two lines

(“ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers— / That perches in the soul—”), then

develops it throughout the poem by telling what the bird does (sing), how it

reacts to hardship (it is unabashed in the storm), where it can be found(everywhere, from “chillest land” to “strangest Sea”), and what it asks for itself

(nothing, not even a single crumb). Though written after “Success is counted

sweetest,” this is still an early poem for Dickinson, and neither her language

nor her themes here are as complicated and explosive as they would become

in her more mature work from the mid-1860s. Still, we find a few of the verbal

shocks that so characterize Dickinson’s mature style: the use of “abash,” for

instance, to describe the storm’s potential effect on the bird, wrenches the

reader back to the reality behind the pretty metaphor; while a singing bird

cannot exactly be “abashed,” the word describes the effect of the storm—or a

more general hardship—upon the speaker’s hopes.

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”

Summary

The speaker exclaims that she is “Nobody,” and asks, “Who are you? / Are

you— Nobody—too?” If so, she says, then they are a pair of nobodies, and

she admonishes her addressee not to tell, for “they’d banish us—you know!”

She says that it would be “dreary” to be “Somebody”—it would be “public” and

require that, “like a Frog,” one tell one’s name “the livelong June— / To an

admiring Bog!”

Form

The two stanzas of “I’m Nobody!” are highly typical for Dickinson, constituted

of loose iambic trimeter occasionally including a fourth stress (“To tell your

name—the livelong June—”). They follow an ABCB rhyme scheme (though in

the first stanza, “you” and “too” rhyme, and “know” is only a half-rhyme, so the

scheme could appear to be AABC), and she frequently uses rhythmic dashes

to interrupt the flow.

Commentary

Ironically, one of the most famous details of Dickinson lore today is that she

was utterly un-famous during her lifetime—she lived a relatively reclusive life

in Amherst, Massachusetts, and though she wrote nearly 1,800 poems, she

published fewer than ten of them. This poem is her most famous and most



playful defense of the kind of spiritual privacy she favored, implying that to be

a Nobody is a luxury incomprehensible to the dreary Somebodies—for they

are too busy keeping their names in circulation, croaking like frogs in a swamp

in the summertime. This poem is an outstanding early example of Dickinson’soften jaunty approach to meter (she uses her trademark dashes quite

forcefully to interrupt lines and interfere with the flow of her poem, as in “How

dreary— to be—Somebody!”). Further, the poem vividly illustrates her

surprising way with language. The juxtaposition in the line “How public—like a

Frog—” shocks the first-time reader, combining elements not typically

considered together, and, thus, more powerfully conveying its meaning (frogs

are “public” like public figures—or Somebodies—because they are constantly

“telling their name”— croaking—to the swamp, reminding all the other frogs of

their identities).

“The Soul selects her own Society—”

Summary

The speaker says that “the Soul selects her own Society—” and then “shuts

the Door,” refusing to admit anyone else—even if “an Emperor be kneeling /

Upon her mat—.” Indeed, the soul often chooses no more than a single

person from “an ample nation” and then closes “the Valves of her attention” to

the rest of the world.

Form

The meter of “The Soul selects her own Society” is much more irregular and

halting than the typical Dickinson poem, although it still roughly fits her usual

structure: iambic trimeter with the occasional line in tetrameter. It is also

uncharacteristic in that its rhyme scheme—if we count half-rhymes such as

“Gate” and “Mat”—is ABAB, rather than ABCB; the first and third lines rhyme,

as well as the second and fourth. However, by using long dashes rhythmically

to interrupt the flow of the meter and effect brief pauses, the poem’s form

remains recognizably Dickinsonian, despite its atypical aspects.

Commentary

Whereas “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” takes a playful tone to the idea of

reclusiveness and privacy, the tone of “The Soul selects her own Society—” is

quieter, grander, and more ominous. The idea that “The Soul selects her own

Society” (that people choose a few companions who matter to them and



exclude everyone else from their inner consciousness) conjures up images of

a solemn ceremony with the ritual closing of the door, the chariots, the

emperor, and the ponderous Valves of the Soul’s attention. Essentially, the

middle stanza functions to emphasize the Soul’s stonily uncompromisingattitude toward anyone trying to enter into her Society once the metaphorical

door is shut—even chariots, even an emperor, cannot persuade her. The third

stanza then illustrates the severity of the Soul’s exclusiveness—even from “an

ample nation” of people, she easily settles on one single person to include,

summarily and unhesitatingly locking out everyone else. The concluding

stanza, with its emphasis on the “One” who is chosen, gives “The Soul selects

her own Society—” the feel of a tragic love poem, although we need not

reduce our understanding of the poem to see its theme as merely romantic.

The poem is an excellent example of Dickinson’s tightly focused skills with

metaphor and imagery; cycling through her regal list of door, divine Majority,

chariots, emperor, mat, ample nation, and stony valves of attention, Dickinson

continually surprises the reader with her vivid and unexpected series of

images, each of which furthers the somber mood of the poem.

“A Bird came down the Walk—...”

Summary

The speaker describes once seeing a bird come down the walk, unaware that

it was being watched. The bird ate an angleworm, then “drank a Dew / From a

convenient Grass—,” then hopped sideways to let a beetle pass by. The bird’s

frightened, bead-like eyes glanced all around. Cautiously, the speaker offered

him “a Crumb,” but the bird “unrolled his feathers” and flew away—as though

rowing in the water, but with a grace gentler than that with which “Oars divide

the ocean” or butterflies leap “off Banks of Noon”; the bird appeared to swim

without splashing.

Form

Structurally, this poem is absolutely typical of Dickinson, using iambic trimeter

with occasional four-syllable lines, following a loose ABCB rhyme scheme,

and rhythmically breaking up the meter with long dashes. (In this poem, the

dashes serve a relatively limited function, occurring only at the end of lines,

and simply indicating slightly longer pauses at line breaks.)



Commentary

Emily Dickinson’s life proves that it is not necessary to travel widely or lead a

life full of Romantic grandeur and extreme drama in order to write great

poetry; alone in her house at Amherst, Dickinson pondered her experience as

fully, and felt it as acutely, as any poet who has ever lived. In this poem, the

simple experience of watching a bird hop down a path allows her to exhibit

her extraordinary poetic powers of observation and description.

Dickinson keenly depicts the bird as it eats a worm, pecks at the grass, hops

by a beetle, and glances around fearfully. As a natural creature frightened by

the speaker into flying away, the bird becomes an emblem for the quick, lively,

ungraspable wild essence that distances nature from the human beings whodesire to appropriate or tame it. But the most remarkable feature of this poem

is the imagery of its final stanza, in which Dickinson provides one of the most

breath-taking descriptions of flying in all of poetry. Simply by offering two

quick comparisons of flight and by using aquatic motion (rowing and

swimming), she evokes the delicacy and fluidity of moving through air. The

image of butterflies leaping “off Banks of Noon,” splashlessly swimming

though the sky, is one of the most memorable in all Dickinson’s writing.

“After great pain, a formal feeling comes—...”

Summary

The speaker notes that following great pain, “a formal feeling” often sets in,

during which the “Nerves” are solemn and “ceremonious, like Tombs.” The

heart questions whether it ever really endured such pain and whether it was

really so recent (“The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, / And

Yesterday, or Centuries before?”). The feet continue to plod mechanically,

with a wooden way, and the heart feels a stone-like contentment. This, the

speaker says, is “the Hour of Lead,” and if the person experiencing it survives

this Hour, he or she will remember it in the same way that “Freezing persons”

remember the snow: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—.”

Form

“After great pain” is structurally looser than most Dickinson poems: The

iambic meter fades in places; line-length ranges from dimeter to pentameter;

the rhyme scheme is haphazard and mostly utilizes couplets (stanza-by-



stanza, it is AABB CDEFF GHII); and the middle stanza is five lines long,

rather than Dickinson’s typical four. Like most other Dickinson poems,

however, it uses the long rhythmic dash to indicate short pauses.

Commentary

Perhaps Emily Dickinson’s greatest achievement as a poet is the record she

left of her own inwardness; because of her extraordinary powers of self-

observation and her extraordinary willingness to map her own feelings as

accurately and honestly as she could, Dickinson has bequeathed us a

multitude of hard, intense, and subtle poems, detailing complicated feelings

rarely described by other poets. And yet, encountering these feelings in the

compression chamber of a Dickinson poem, one recognizes them instantly.“After great pain, a formal feeling comes” describes the fragile emotional

equilibrium that settles heavily over a survivor of recent trauma or profound

grief.

Dickinson’s descriptive words lend a funereal feel to the poem: The emotion

following pain is “formal,” one’s nerves feel like “Tombs,” one’s heart is stiff

and disbelieving. The feet’s “Wooden way” evokes a wooden casket, and the

final “like a stone” recalls a headstone. The speaker emphasizes the fragile

state of a person experiencing the “formal feeling” by never referring to such

people as whole human beings, detailing their bodies in objectified fragments

(“The stiff Heart,” “The Feet, mechanical,” etc.).

“I died for Beauty—but was scarce...”

Summary

The speaker says that she died for Beauty, but she was hardly adjusted to her

tomb before a man who died for Truth was laid in a tomb next to her. When

the two softly told each other why they died, the man declared that Truth and

Beauty are the same, so that he and the speaker were “Brethren.” The

speaker says that they met at night, “as Kinsmen,” and talked between their

tombs until the moss reached their lips and covered up the names on their

tombstones.



Form

This poem follows many of Dickinson’s typical formal patterns—the ABCB

rhyme scheme, the rhythmic use of the dash to interrupt the flow—but has a

more regular meter, so that the first and third lines in each stanza are iambic

tetrameter, while the second and fourth lines are iambic trimeter, creating a

four-three-four-three stress pattern in each stanza.

Commentary

This bizarre, allegorical death fantasy recalls Keats (“Beauty is Truth, Truth

Beauty,” from Ode on a Grecian Urn), but its manner of presentation belongs

uniquely to Dickinson. In this short lyric, Dickinson manages to include a

sense of the macabre physicality of death (“Until the Moss had reached our

lips—”), the high idealism of martyrdom (“I died for Beauty. . . One who died

for Truth”), a certain kind of romantic yearning combined with longing for

Platonic companionship (“And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night—”), and an

optimism about the afterlife (it would be nice to have a like-minded friend) with

barely sublimated terror about the fact of death (it would be horrible to lie in

the cemetery having a conversation through the walls of a tomb). As the poem

progresses, the high idealism and yearning for companionship gradually give

way to mute, cold death, as the moss creeps up the speaker’s corpse and her headstone, obliterating both her capacity to speak (covering her lips) and her

identity (covering her name).

The ultimate effect of this poem is to show that every aspect of human life—

ideals, human feelings, identity itself—is erased by death. But by making the

erasure gradual—something to be “adjusted” to in the tomb—and by

portraying a speaker who is untroubled by her own grim state, Dickinson

creates a scene that is, by turns, grotesque and compelling, frightening and

comforting. It is one of her most singular statements about death, and like so

many of Dickinson’s poems, it has no parallels in the work of any other writer.

“I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—...”

Summary

The speaker says that she heard a fly buzz as she lay on her deathbed. The

room was as still as the air between “the Heaves” of a storm. The eyes

around her had cried themselves out, and the breaths were firming

themselves for “that last Onset,” the moment when, metaphorically, “the King /



Be witnessed—in the Room—.” The speaker made a will and “Signed away /

What portion of me be / Assignable—” and at that moment, she heard the fly.

It interposed itself “With blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—” between the

speaker and the light; “the Windows failed”; and then she died (“I could notsee to see—”).

Form

“I heard a Fly buzz” employs all of Dickinson’s formal patterns: trimeter and

tetrameter iambic lines (four stresses in the first and third lines of each stanza,

three in the second and fourth, a pattern Dickinson follows at her most

formal); rhythmic insertion of the long dash to interrupt the meter; and an

ABCB rhyme scheme. Interestingly, all the rhymes before the final stanza arehalf-rhymes (Room/Storm, firm/Room, be/Fly), while only the rhyme in the

final stanza is a full rhyme (me/see). Dickinson uses this technique to build

tension; a sense of true completion comes only with the speaker’s death.

Commentary

One of Dickinson’s most famous poems, “I heard a Fly buzz” strikingly

describes the mental distraction posed by irrelevant details at even the most

crucial moments—even at the moment of death. The poem then becomeseven weirder and more macabre by transforming the tiny, normally

disregarded fly into the figure of death itself, as the fly’s wing cuts the speaker

off from the light until she cannot “see to see.” But the fly does not grow in

power or stature; its final severing act is performed “With Blue—uncertain

stumbling Buzz—.” This poem is also remarkable for its detailed evocation of

a deathbed scene—the dying person’s loved ones steeling themselves for the

end, the dying woman signing away in her will “What portion of me be /

Assignable” (a turn of phrase that seems more Shakespearean than it does

Dickinsonian).

“The Brain—is wider than the Sky—”

Summary

The speaker declares that the brain is wider than the sky, for if they are held

side by side, the brain will absorb the sky “With ease—and You—beside.” She

says that the brain is deeper than the sea, for if they are held “Blue to Blue,”

the brain will absorb the sea as sponges and buckets absorb water. The



brain, the speaker insists, is the “weight of God”—for if they are hefted “Pound

for Pound,” the brain’s weight will differ from the weight of God only in the way

that syllable differs from sound.

Form

This poem employs all of Dickinson’s familiar formal patterns: it consists of

three four-line stanzas metered iambically, with tetrameter used for the first

and third lines of each stanza and trimeter used for the second and fourth

lines; it follows ABCB rhyme schemes in each stanza; and uses the long dash

as a rhythmic device designed to break up the flow of the meter and indicate

short pauses.

Commentary

Another of Dickinson’s most famous poems, “The Brain—is wider than the

Sky—” is in many ways also one of her easiest to understand—a remarkable

fact, given that the poem’s theme is actually the quite complicated relationship

between the mind and the outer world. Using the homiletic mode that

characterizes much of her early poetry—”the brain is wider than the sky” is as

homiletic a statement as “success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er

succeed”—, Dickinson testifies to the mind’s capacity to absorb, interpret, andsubsume perception and experience. The brain is wider than the sky despite

the sky’s awesome size because the brain is able to incorporate the universe

into itself, and thereby even to absorb the ocean. The source of this capacity,

in this poem, is God. In an astonishing comparison Dickinson likens the minds

capabilities to “the weight of God”, differing from that weight only as syllable

differs from sound.

This final stanza reads quite easily, but is actually rather complex—it is

difficult to know precisely what Dickinson means. The brain differs from God,

or from the weight of God, as syllable differs from sound; the difference

between syllable and sound is that syllable is given human structure as part of

a word, while sound is raw, unformed. Thus Dickinson seems to conceive of

God here as an essence that takes its form from that of the human mind.

Study Questions & Essay Topics



Study Questions

1. Think about Dickinson’s descriptions of nature, such as in “A Bird came

down the Walk” and “A narrow Fellow in the Grass.” What techniques does

she use to create her indelible images? What makes poems such as these

memorable despite their thematic simplicity?

Answer for Study Question 1 >>

2. Dickinson is often described as a poet of “inwardness.” What do you think

this means? How does Dickinson convey the inner workings of the mind in a

poem such as “I cannot live with You”?


3. Think about Dickinson’s tone. Does she seem to be writing for other people

or only for herself? How might she universalize private feelings?


Suggested Essay Topics

1. Compare and contrast two of Dickinson’s poems that deal with the subject

of death. How does Dickinson portray the fact of death in a new and startling

way in each? What are her apparent attitudes about dying?

2. Throughout her poetic career, Dickinson relied largely on a single,

powerfully focused style and on a single set of formal characteristics for her

poems. What are some of these characteristics? How might her style be

described? What is the effect of this kind of uniformity on the work of a poet

with so much imaginative range?



3. Dickinson’s poems often introduce an idea, then develop it with a sequence

of metaphoric images. Name two examples of this kind of poem. What are

some of her images? How do they work as metaphors?

4. Compare an early Dickinson poem (such as “‘Hope’ is the thing with

feathers”) to a later one (such as “My life closed twice before its close”). How

has her work changed? How has it remained the same? Did Dickinson

experience much development as a poet as she grew older, or did her work

largely remain the same?

Quiz

1. What two images does Dickinson use to symbolize “success” in “Success is

counted sweetest”?

(A) The nectar and the victorious army

(B) The nectar and the olive branch

(C) The olive branch and the laurel

(D) The laurel and the victorious army

2. What does the poet describe as “the Door ajar” in “I cannot live with you”?

(A) Her eye

(B) The prison window

(C) The oceans

(D) God’s eye

3. Who is entombed near the speaker of “I died for Beauty”?

(A) One who died for Fame

(B) One who died for Truth



(C) One who died for Love

(D) Abraham Lincoln

4. Which of the following poets was Dickinson’s close friend and mentor in

Amherst?

(A) Ralph Waldo Emerson

(B) Walt Whitman

(C) William Blake

(D) None of the above; Dickinson was not friends with any important

poets.

5. In “Because I could not stop for Death,” what does the speaker pass by

during her carriage-ride with Death?

(A) A schoolyard, a college dance, and a parade

(B) A schoolyard, a ripened field, and a setting sun

(C) A setting sun, a scarecrow, and a college dance

(D) A ripened field, a battle, and a schoolyard

6. Which of the following does the bird not do in “A bird came down the walk”?

(A) Perch on the speaker’s finger

(B) Eat an angleworm

(C) Drink dew from the grass

(D) Fly away

7. What is “all we know of heaven / And all we need of hell”?



(A) Love

(B) Childbirth

(C) Death

(D) Parting

8. What can the brain absorb, according to one Dickinson lyric?

(A) The sea and all the rivers

(B) The sea and the land

(C) The sky and the sea

(D) The sky and the sun

9. In “I heard a Fly buzz,” what cuts the speaker off from the light?

(A) The hand of death

(B) The silhouette of her lover

(C) The closing curtain

(D) The fly’s wing

10. Where did Dickinson die?

(A) At her family home in Amherst

(B) In a hospital in Rochester, Minnesota

(C) In a hotel in Washington, DC

(D) At sea, while traveling to visit her nephew in France



11. How many poems were discovered among Dickinson’s belongings after

she died?

(A) Nearly three hundred

(B) Nearly 1,800

(C) Nearly 8,500

(D) None; the unpublished poems were never found.

12. What animal is “public” in “I’m Nobody”?

(A) A bee

(B) A snake

(C) A bird

(D) A frog

13. What does the speaker feel when she sees the snake in “A narrow

Fellow”?

(A) Delight

(B) Despair

(C) A hot flash

(D) A chill

Bibliography

Dickinson, Emily. The Essential Dickinson. Selected and with an introduction

by Joyce Carol Oates. New York: The Ecco Press, 1996.



How to Cite This SparkNote

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SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 6 May 2013.

The Chicago Manual of Style

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2002. http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/dickinson/ (accessed May 6, 2013).

APA

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6, 2013, from http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/dickinson/

In Text Citation

MLA

“Their conversation is awkward, especially when she mentions Wickham, asubject Darcy clearly wishes to avoid” (SparkNotes Editors).

APA

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subject Darcy clearly wishes to avoid” (SparkNotes Editors, 2002).

Footnote

The Chicago Manual of Style

Chicago requires the use of footnotes, rather than parenthetical citations, in

conjunction with a list of works cited when dealing with literature.

1 SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Dickinson’s Poetry.” SparkNotes LLC.

2002. http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/dickinson/ (accessed May 6, 2013).



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