19 pages • 38 minutes read
Emily DickinsonA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Emily Dickinson’s poem is only eight lines long, so it’s short and compact. As her speaker takes aim at the majority and their uncritical views of “Madness” Versus Sense, the poem’s many dashes help give the poem a quick and sharp form to be fired at the multitudes. In other words, the poem’s concentrated form becomes a way for the singular speaker to punish the majority in the small way available.
As the poem also deals with Conformity Versus Singularity, Dickinson reinforces the juxtaposition by not conforming to one strict meter and instead using two different meters. Lines 1 and 7 feature iambic tetrameter—that is, there are four sets of unstressed-stressed syllables. Lines 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8 use iambic trimeter, or three sets of unstressed-stressed syllables. The two meters reflect the majority’s imputed argument that senselessness and sensibleness are reducible to a binary: “Assent — and you are sane — / Demur — you’re straightway dangerous —” (Lines 6-7). Line 3, however, doesn’t conform to either meter (“Much Sense — the starkest Madness”), and as Dickinson gives the trimeter five lines and the tetrameter two lines, she makes them unequal, just like the singular person isn’t equal to the majority—they’re above it, in her speaker’s eyes.
By Emily Dickinson
A Bird, came down the Walk
Emily Dickinson
A Clock stopped—
Emily Dickinson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass (1096)
Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Emily Dickinson
"Faith" is a fine invention
Emily Dickinson
Fame Is a Fickle Food (1702)
Emily Dickinson
Hope is a strange invention
Emily Dickinson
"Hope" Is the Thing with Feathers
Emily Dickinson
I Can Wade Grief
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Cleaving in my Mind
Emily Dickinson
I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
Emily Dickinson
If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Emily Dickinson
If I should die
Emily Dickinson
If you were coming in the fall
Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz — when I died
Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who Are You?
Emily Dickinson
Success Is Counted Sweetest
Emily Dickinson
Tell all the truth but tell it slant
Emily Dickinson
The Only News I Know
Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson