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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.
Given Dickinson’s daring reinvention of poetic forms and her careful sculpting of lines that give her poems their idiosyncratic look, Poem 683 looks surprisingly, well, conventional. Although later editors broke the poem into two quatrains, the original handwritten copy, sent to her longtime friend, newspaper publisher Samuel Bowles, is a single eight-line poem.
That might appear to be merely an annoying form adjustment—after all, the poem is so brief it hardly requires such division. But Dickinson relished playing with irony, bringing together contradictory ideas within the same argument without attempting to reconcile the contradiction. Her poems thus often use her eccentric sense of form to play up her thematic argument: The world is a fascinating/terrifying place where contradictory absolutes make perfect sense.
In this, Dickinson’s original form may help understand a poem that suggests that the soul is at once mighty and vulnerable, united and fragmented, both friend and enemy to us. How better to underscore that contradiction than to argue the divisions within the soul in a poem that has no divisions, where complete ideas move one to the next despite how contradictory they each to are the next. Each couplet argues the exact opposite of the couplet before it.
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