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#Post#: 76--------------------------------------------------
I Dwell in possibility by Emily Dickinson
By: StircrazyReality Date: September 25, 2017, 2:50 am
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This is a section of my midterm assessment for Philosophy and
Literature.
Poem:
HTML https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52197/i-dwell-in-possibility-466
6. Literary Analysis (468 Words)
I dwell in possibility by Emily Dickinson overlays the
aspectual filter of a vast dwelling structure onto the form of
poetry in general. A house symbolizing the dwelling place forms
the key subject explored in the poem.
Dickinson characterizes her dwelling as specifically of more
value (in a general sense of the term) than Prose, “A fairer
House than Prose”, however her dwelling is named only
figuratively as Possibility, “I dwell in Possibility” –
Possibility>Prose. As a contrast to prose it would be fair to
say her dwelling is poetry, however it is perhaps significant
that she does not put a definitional label on that which
contrasts prose. One could imagine prose as bounded land, and
what opposes it as unmappable, and thus indefinable, boundless
sea. Her dwelling place is however valuable because of its
vastness.
“Everlasting”, “more numerous” and “spreading wide” show a
reoccurring motif of vastness. The first two respectively
characterize the symbolic object of the house, “Everlasting
roof”, “More numerous of windows”. Meter reinforces the
spaciousness of the dwelling place, as while the poem in general
follows a 7-6-8-6 meter, the above motif always occurs on the
longest line in the verse. In fact enjambment makes some of
these long lines feel even longer when spoken, “And for an
everlasting Roof/ The Gambrels of the Sky”. In contrast to the
first two vastness motifs characterizing the dwelling place, the
last vastness motif characterizes the stretching of the first
person “I” into that very vastness. “The spreading wide my
narrow Hands/ To gather Paradise”. A finite ‘narrow’ “I”
(Subject) tries to gather a perhaps infinite ‘everlasting’
vastness (Paradise is not small but vast). This clarifies the
motif as stretching into vastness. The finite “I” wishes to be
dwarfed by the vastness of the place they dwell in.
This recalls the romantic conception of the ‘sublime’, some
natural phenomenon that dwarfs one and makes one awed. “In A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757) the influential critic and
politician Edmund Burke… uses sublime in connection with
abstract or obscure ideas, such as infinity, vastness and the
divine.” (Italics added) . The sublime is greater than ones
perception or imagination can encompasses, and this causes
terror and awe. “Paradise” is not small and wholly
encompass-able, but vast so that the finite “I” may only have a
little bit. Prose is perhaps not as vast; Prose can be
encompassed, and thus cannot touch the sublime and divine. The
sublime must be beyond one, not within ones grasp . This is a
possible interpretation as to why vastness (and possibility) is
desirable.
Emily Dickinson paints prose as inferior to some poetic dwelling
place that she cannot define or name, and which she nevertheless
experiences as divine and sublime.
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