Sample Poem Analysis using Emily Dickinson Poem:
Structure: The poem is composed of six four-line stanzas (called quatrains). The rhyme scheme is mostly a b c b, with lines two and four of each stanza using slant rhyme. The lines are mostly end-stopped.
Progression: The poem begins with the pronoun “it,” for which we have no referent. Indeed, the speaker herself does not know exactly what the “it” is. She begins by trying to use process of elimination to discover what the “it” is. She starts out claiming, “It was not Death, for I stood up, / And all the dead lie down - ”. If the first comparison that comes to mind is death, we can tell that whatever the “it” is, it must be pretty bad. Somehow the “it” is like death—the only way she knows she is alive is that she is standing up. Next, she moves to night as a possible comparison (note that night often has negative connotations—darkness, as metaphorical and literal, sometimes a euphemism for death, etc.), but rejects it because she can hear the bells chiming for noon. Note the parallel syntax in these first four lines. She continues on, in stanza two, to try frost, which she also rejects because she feels “Siroccos” (a warm wind) on her skin. Frost is something that is cold and also something that kills (plants, people, etc.). Again, she must be experiencing something unpleasant to keep reaching for such negative things against which she can define the “it.” Note the word choice in this stanza. The wind “crawl[s]” on her flesh. Crawl has negative connotations, and one usually thinks of things like insects crawling on the skin. Then the speaker moves to the opposite of frost, fire. Fire is also destructive and can kill. Then she says she knows it is not fire because her feet are cold (they are “marble feet” that could “keep a Chancel, cool – ”).
The first big shift in the poem comes in the third stanza. Here, the speaker abandons the pattern of “It was not ______, because ______,” and starts trying to describe what the “it” was like instead. She says “And yet, it tasted, like them all.” The “all” here is ambiguous. Grammatically, Dickinson has arranged these lines so that all could refer either to death, night, frost, and fire, or to “The Figures” mentioned in the following line. This kind of grammatical ambiguity pops up again in the final line of the stanza, where Dickinson writes “Reminded me, of mine – ”. To what the “mine” refers is unclear. It might be “The Figures” or “Burial.” Again, we have a continued focus on death. We are not sure why she is reminded of whatever is “mine.” The reader is left to speculate. It is also important to note that, in the second line of this stanza, the use of the word “seen” brings the number of total senses described to four. She uses touch, taste, hearing, and seeing to help her figure out what the “it is,” just as a person might turn an unfamiliar object over in his hands, shake it, sniff it, etc. to figure out what the object actually is.
Stanza four gives us another simile “As if my life were shaven,/ And fitted to a frame,” which sounds like there was something wrong with her to begin with. Something had to be altered and made to fit a frame. The frame bit suggests art (a canvas, a photograph), and does not quite go with the “shaven” description, which brings to mind the shaving of animal skins for leather goods or book pages (parchment and vellum used to be made this way). Nor do either of these images go well with the next line about not breathing without a key. This line makes it seem as if she has been locked away somewhere, as in behind a door, or in a safe. The phrase “could not breathe” also suggests death or dying. She continues on with “And ‘twas like Midnight, some – ”—which does not go well with any of the images in this stanza. They do not add up to one cohesive simile. They are all attempts at describing something about the “it,” but we only get aspects of the “it,” and some of these seem contradictory.
More contradictions are in store in the following stanzas. At first we hear it is like midnight, when “everything that ticked – has stopped – ”. But then, in the sixth stanza, she says it was “most, like Chaos – stopless – cool - ”. Stanza five brings to mind the image of a clock (or heart) that stops. This death-like image is continued in the third line of the stanza where Dickinson writes “Or Grisly frosts – first Autumn morns, / Repeal the Beating Ground – ”. The choice of “grisly” certainly darkens the meaning here, as does the use of the word “morns.” Although this is technically just an abbreviation of “morning,” it sounds like the word “mourns,” as in “to grieve.” Autumn, too, darkens the meaning. Instead of morning here being a positive image, it is an Autumn morning, a morning in the season where things begin to die, one step closer to winter and true death. The last line of this stanza is odd, too. “Repeal” means to take or call back, but it also contains the word “peal,” which is how one describes the ringing of bells. Bells peal. The “Beating Ground” is odd as well. Why is the ground beating? Is it alive somehow? If it is repealed, does that mean it is killed? The meaning here is ambiguous, and not helped by the addition of the final stanza.
Stanza six, as already noted, presents a contradiction to the stopping in the previous stanza. Note here, however, we have moved from the “it” being somewhat like Midnight, to being “most” like Chaos. The following lines read “Without a Chance, or spar - / Or even a Report of Land - / To justify – Despair.” Here the image is of sailors on a ship looking for somewhere to land, (a spar is like a peninsula) for some hope of avoiding a watery grave. But obviously what the speaker is facing is even worse than despair. It is like the despair of sailors constantly moving, but never getting anywhere, but it is not exactly like despair.
This is the end of the poem, yet we have never actually answered that original question—what is the “it”? However, we now have enough information to take a pretty good guess. It is likely some psychological state, some kind of deep depression, possibly the result of the loss of a loved one. We have repeated mentions of things having to do with death/destruction (death, burial, night, frost, fire, etc.) and churches (the chancel, marble, bells, etc.) that might suggest a recent funeral, but it’s impossible to say for sure.
Connecting formal aspects to meaning: Once you’ve figured out the meaning, go back and look at the rhyme, the line breaks, etc. and try to connect them to meaning. For example, the slant rhyme Dickinson uses is appropriate because, just as she is searching for what the “it” is, and struggling to define it by saying it is kind of like this, but not exactly, she is also mirroring this struggle with the imperfect rhymes. The words “down” and “Noon” almost rhyme, but not quite. In a similar way, the lines are end-stopped, not enjambed, which gives a sense of hesitation to the poem, as if the speaker is pausing at the end of each line to gather her thoughts as she tries again and again to describe what the “it” is like or not like. She uses anaphora in stanza four, which expresses something close to frustration as she continuously reaches for a comparison that will be “right,” but never quite finds one, so she keeps having to add on comparison after faulty comparison.