16 pages • 32 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.
The form of “What Soft—Cherubic Creatures” is compact and tidy. The poem is a lyric, so its shape is small, and the lines are relatively even. The stanzas contribute to the organized appearance because each stanza contains four lines, which means all three stanzas are quatrains. The poem doesn’t abide by any traditional meter, yet the poem comes close to syllabics, which is when the poet establishes a pattern according to the number of syllables in each line but isn’t concerned about the unstressed/stressed pattern. The first line in every stanza has seven syllables; the second line in every stanza has six syllables; the last line in each stanza has six syllables; but the second-to-last line in the stanzas upends the pattern as Line 3 has nine syllables and Lines 7 and 11 have seven syllables.
Perhaps Dickinson subverts her meter just as she undercuts norms about gentlewomen and their supposed virtue. At the same time, the tidy form undercuts Dickinson’s message: Her speaker chastises gentlewomen for their “[h]orror” (Line 6) of disorderly, imperfect reality, yet Dickinson’s poem is far from messy.
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
Much Madness is divinest Sense—
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