18 pages • 36 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 poem divides into two nine-line stanzas. The first is narrative-like in that it relates a story, albeit symbolic, of the impact joy can have on a person who understands that life is not designed for joy as a constant state of existence. The stanza delivers the story of a person unaccustomed to alcohol tapping into the delightful inebriation (the least push of Joy) and returning, a bit addled but hardly an alcoholic, ready to embrace the reassuring stability of the difficult day to day.
The second stanza would be familiar to mid-19th century readers. The stanza deals more deliberately with the poem’s lesson as if Dickinson wants to show she can deliver a lesson on par with the stodgy Fireside Poets. In this stanza, however, the lesson delivered is unconventional, even upsetting on first read. Suffering is invigorating, the greater the sorrows, the more resilient the heart can be.
Be a giant. That use of a closing stanza was typical of the public poetry of the Fireside Poets—the closing stanza delivers in pithy lines rendered in tight rhythm and often clever rhymes the lesson the poet wants to convey in lines sculpted to encourage easily memorization.
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 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
There is no Frigate like a Book
Emily Dickinson