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, and subsume
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.
