Dickinson’s Poetry

Her main techniques are metaphor and a new and startling application of language; both techniques result in powerful images. In “A Bird came down the Walk,” Dickinson spectacularly closes the poem with a stanza equating flight through the air with movement through water, leading to the breathtaking line, “Butterflies, off Banks of Noon / Leap, splashless as they swim.” In “A narrow Fellow,” she uses surprising language to convey the impression of a snake moving (“It wrinkled, and was gone—”) and of her own chill on seeing the snake (“Zero at the Bone”). Thematically uncomplicated, Dickinson’s nature poems nevertheless describe important ways in which human beings interact with creatures of nature—:These creatures can shy from humanity, like the Bird, or pose a threat, like the Narrow Fellow. In both cases, Dickinson creates memorable poems by closely observing details of the physical world and by vividly generating new images in the mind.

To say that Dickinson is a poet of inwardness is simply to recognize that her own thoughts and feelings are her most important subjects; moreover, her treatment of them avoids all reference to the relevant social or philosophical issues of her day. In “I cannot live with You,” Dickinson shows the mind as it speculates painfully on what might have been (life with the beloved, death with the beloved, heaven with the beloved) even as it acknowledges that these will never be; Dickinson indicates the despair inherent in this knowledge with the repeated rhetorical construction, “I cannot . . . with You.” In the final stanza, Dickinson’s speaker is unable to confront the reality of her separation from her beloved, and her delicate metaphors reflect this (as in “the Door ajar / That Oceans are”). Ultimately, however, the speaker realizes that she cannot evade her predicament, and she ends her poem with the single word that summarizes her feelings: “Despair.”

Though she was a reclusive individual and a poet of extraordinary inward depth, Dickinson’s poems are not simply private shorthand for her own thoughts; on the contrary, Dickinson tends to embody her own experience in universalizing language, implying two things: one, that other human beings will identify with her thoughts and feelings; and two, that her poetry will enable her audience to enter into and share her experience. Poetry, like letter-writing (she described her poems as “My letter to the World / That never wrote to Me”), was never a solitary endeavor for Dickinson; she always had a reader in mind, even though she did not publish during her lifetime. Her most common technique for universalizing her own experience is to present her observations in the form of homilies, short moral aphorisms, such as “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.”