Analysis of Dickinson’s “The Brain is Wider and the Sky” and “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”
Poetry is an art that is often wrought by souls who have considerable difficulty interacting with people in the world at large. While Robert Frost and Maya Angelou may have felt comfortable reading their work at Presidential inaugurations, others such as Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson felt extremely out of place in society and chose instead to sequester themselves from the world as much as possible. It might seem that this ascetic sort of life would make it difficult to render poetry that is meaningful to readers who interact frequently with others, without the type of angst that so often informs verse. In “The Brain is Wider than the Sky” and “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Dickinson uses symbolism to express powerful metaphysical themes that resonate with the reader long after he has put the poem down. The ideas at work in both of these poems show a sensitive and effective use of these devices.
Both of the poems under consideration use a consistent symbol from beginning to end to guide the reader toward the theme in question. In “The Brain is Wider than the Sky,” each of the three stanzas begins with “The Brain is” One point worth noting, from a syntactical standpoint, is that the word “brain” is capitalized throughout. Capitalizing nouns in this way is common in German, and at one point was common in English: if you look at the writings of Jonathan Swift, and some of the Founding Fathers of the United States, you’ll see that some nouns are capitalized, particularly if they are abstract or otherwise important to the rhetorical argument at hand. By the time that Dickinson was writing, though, this sort of capitalization was not as common – in fact, it had faded out by the end of the eighteenth century (Osselton, p. 49). When Dickinson capitalizes the word, she accomplishes the more modern goal of personification, giving the brain a much more significant identity than the lump of gray matter inside the skull.
Looking at the actual role of the brain in Dickinson’s poem, the symbolic significance is clear. Because the brain can contain the sky – and not vice versa – (3-4), the speaker indicates a figurative role – here, the imaginative function of the brain. Not only can the brain contain all of the sky through its ability to create realities, it can also contain its owner, as the brain is often used in speculation, daydreaming and other activities. In the second stanza, the speaker notes that the brain can also “absorb” the sea “as sponges—buckets—do--“ (7-8). Again, as with the sky, the brain can imagine all of the creatures and other adventures that await at all depths of the sea. The third stanza brings the symbol to its full meaning, comparing the work of the brain to the work of God. Their comparative ability to create “will differ – if they do -- / As Syllable from Sound – “(11-12). Here, the brain becomes, briefly, a physical object that one can “heft” (10) and weigh – and so does God, which is a particularly intriguing use of metonymy, as giving God (the Father, anyway) a physical reality is, at the least, problematic for theologians. Dickinson’s theme here, though, has to do with the creative power that our brains contain.
In “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” the very figure of Death itself serves as the driving symbol. The speaker gives Death some attributes that one might not expect – he “kindly” stops to pick up the speaker (2), because the appointed time has come for her passing. Now that the speaker’s life has come to an end, the time for bustling is apparently over: the carriage “slowly [drives], he [knows] no haste” (5) – after all, what is the point of hurrying, if death is the end of everything, at least on the earth? The speaker follows along, putting away her “labor, andleisure too,/For his civility” (7-8). The calm aura which Death exudes for the speaker motivates her to, as well, lay down any sense of urgency.
As the carriage goes forward, the images are of a day coming to an end: recess, then fields of grain (signifying the coming autumn after the harvest), and then the setting sun. As the poem moves toward its end, the images become more literal – now the speaker has “only gossamer” (15) to wear, and will live in “a house that [seems]/A swelling of the ground,” (17-18) with a roof that is “scarcely visible,/The cornice but a mound” (19-20). Clearly, this will be the speaker’s burial ground, but because she has not quite surrendered the perspective of the living, this tomb seems, quite naturally, to be her next home. One wonders if the speaker’s experiences here mirror Dickinson’s own views of the afterlife; here, the speaker appears to be trapped in some sort of limbo: “Since then ‘tis centuries, and yet each/Feels shorter than the day/I first surmised the horses’ heads/Were toward eternity”(21-24). Not much seems to have changed for the speaker, who appears to live yet in her “house” below the ground. For the speaker, Death as a symbol is a kind (while implacable) host, bringing one away from a life of toil and effort to a quiet, empty infinity. The symbol of the figure of Death serves to express the theme of this apparently solitary, idle existence beyond the grave.
One commonality of all of Emily Dickinson’s poems is the use of symbols and other forms of figurative language throughout, with the purpose of expressing particular themes. While this could be said to be true of most poetry, her works generally contain anywhere between eight and 24 lines, with an extremely tight use of modifiers to generate a series of mental images that help the reader not only understand Dickinson’s ideas, but to see her images as though they were being drawn for him. In the instance of these two poems, the idea of God as being a somewhat distant creator, more suitable for hefting and measuring than engaging in conversation on the one hand, and strangely absent from the afterlife on the other, places Dickinson more in the camp of the deist than the ardent believer. Given her choice to live apart from society, though, one wonders if any deity other than a distant caretaker would entice her faith.
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.” Web. Retrieved 20 January 2012 from
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/stop.html
Dickinson, Emily. “The Brain is Wider than the Sky.” Web. Retrieved 20 January 12 from
http://poemhunter.com/poem/the-brain-is-wider-than-the-sky/
Osselton, N.E. Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English. Eds.
Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes with Hans Jansen. "Spelling-Book Rules and the
Capitalization of Nouns in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries." The Netherlands:
Wolters-Noordhoff Groningen, 1985.
