To open a poem by saying “I felt a cleavage in my mind / As if my brain had split” is to thrust the reader into a psychic intimacy with the fractured speaker. Also, her poems tend to end abruptly and decisively, often with epigrammatic authority (“The only secret people keep / Is Immortality”).

Her tiny, untitled poems may fit her sensibility and provide the verbal equivalent of a home’s safe enclosure—a room within a room—but the shortness of her lines is due to something else: her preference for common meter, the meter of ballads and Protestant hymns, and even of nursery rhymes. In common meter, a line of four beats is followed by a line of three beats.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

Or, more speedily,

Old King Cole was a merry old soul

And a merry old soul was he.

Or, with Dickinson,

A thought went up my Mind to-day

That I have had before,…

Rhythmically, the three-beat line sounds like an answer to the four-beat line, and it also provides a one-beat pause at the end, a space to breathe. Dickinson used other kinds of cadences, but common meter is the usual gait of her poetry. Almost every Dickinson poem can be sung—like it or not—to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” a song in common meter. But unlike that song, her poems also include a counter-rhythm she created by interrupting the regular beat with dashes—her obsessive type of punctuation—and by her sudden jumps of thought. Instead of a steady run of meaning, the Dickinson poem hops from one figure to another in a kind of zigzag logic that requires not just our concentration but our own agility in making imaginative and grammatical leaps. Even her obituary in the Springfield Republican noted that she was “quick as the electric spark in her intuitions.”

At the heart of Dickinson’s imaginative originality is her use of metaphor to guide the direction of a poem and to examine the mysteries of life and death. The way into a Dickinson poem is often through its dominant metaphor, for once the metaphoric pattern becomes visible, the puzzle of the poem is solved. Like John Donne, Dickinson drew on a large storehouse of vocabularies, employing the language of knitting, sailing, medicine, chemistry, geography, gemology, gambling, money, and persistently, the Bible. Her cramped life in her father’s house in Amherst did not limit her imaginative range; on the contrary, her seclusion may have provided what Gaston Bachelard calls a “felicitous space,” that is, a safe enclosure where the imagination finds itself aroused and free to roam. As she puts it in one opening stanza,

I never saw a moor,

I never saw the sea;

Yet I know how the heather looks,

And what a wave must be.

Dickinson’s figures of speech are often so curious as to amount to a kind of New England surrealism. In her poems, the sun is dressed in a satin vest, the act of attention has valves, a bird bubbles away, thought wears a hood, the Alps wear bonnets, a book is a frigate, angels sport hats of snow, lips are buckled, lips are granite, and the bottom of the mind is lined with stones. Such local wonders would bedazzle or perplex us were it not for the way her poems are logically organized. Besides her sense into compact, three- or four-line stanzas, Dickinson habitually uses parallel structure. The syntactical balance of the following poem is typical:

Will there really be a morning?

Is there such a thing as day?

Could I see it from the mountains

If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like water-lilies?

Has it feathers like a bird?

Is it brought from famous countries

Of which I have never heard?

Oh, some scholar! Oh, some sailor!

Oh, some wise man from the skies!

Please to tell a little pilgrim

Where the place called morning lies!

In the poem’s tidy rhetoric, stanzas one and two each contain three questions, while the final stanza is set on the tripod of scholar, sailor, and heavenly wise man. But within the symmetrical ranks of the poem, notice the Alice-in-Wonderland strangeness of imagining herself as tall as a mountain, not to mention the queer notion of water lilies having feet. The poem mixes the coy with the despairing as only Dickinson can. She casts herself as a naive “little pilgrim,” who wants to know where morning is; but the darker implication of the poem is that the speaker is locked into the night and is driven to such childish questioning because she doubts that morning will ever come again.

Here is another poem with parallel structure in which a childlike fancy is finally buried under the macabre:

I died for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

“For beauty,” I replied.

“And I for truth—the two are one;

We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.

The first two stanzas share the interests of beauty and truth in equal measure, then in the final one, the image of a good-night conversation—one thinks of children in their beds—is suddenly replaced by the grim reality of suffocation and oblivion. The feeling of ratio and balance contrasts starkly with the horror of the final lines.

English is a language with a dual personality, and Dickinson is one of a group of poets adept at blending the formality of its Latin with the bluntness of its Anglo-Saxon, mixing the hot and cold of conceptual and concrete diction (as in “Time’s consummate plush”). In playing one diction against another, Dickinson reveals that she herself has two sides, her voice modulating between the polite and the audacious, the sedate and the bold, the domestic and the cosmic. One of her best known poems opens thus,

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,

And I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For his civility.

The throes of death are transformed into a ceremonious carriage ride, and death himself behaves like a kindly gentleman. In “Civility” and “Immortality” the social is made to rhyme with the infinite. Another poem opens by fully domesticating death:

The grave my little cottage is,

Where, keeping house for thee,

I make my parlor orderly,

And lay the marble tea.

Elsewhere in Dickinson, morning shows its “politeness” by not waking up the dead; the coffin awaiting us all is called “hospitable”; the coffin is also a bed that should be made carefully, “its mattress straight,” “its pillow round.” Of a friend who died, Dickinson says she “Took up her simple wardrobe / And started for the sun.” And here the room of the dying, with its night stand and wall paper, is simply rendered:

The dying need but little, dear,—

A glass of water’s all,

A flower’s unobtrusive face

To punctuate the wall,…

This same politeness finds further expression in Dickinson’s lack of titles, as if modesty would not permit a banner to fly over her poem, and in her sometimes comic obliqueness: not a snake but a “narrow fellow in the grass,” not a bird but a “thing with feathers.” Her habit of mixing the formal and the daily not only creates an element of surprise in her poems but also invites the reader to shuttle back and forth from the mental to the physical. Her application of the double vocabulary of English reminds us that poetry is a doorway that connects the room of the invisible with the room of the visible.

As readers, we must not let the air of decorum, the jauntiness of her meter, or the tidiness of her small poems cloud the fact that she is habitually writing about extreme states—pain, aloneness, death. Not to mention madness. Sanity, for Dickinson, is a precarious condition; the brain can slip its “groove,” the “plank” of reason can snap in two. Perhaps the true power of her poetry lies in the tension between these extreme subjects and the polite orderliness of her little poems. By setting her verse in the familiar cadence of common meter and by packaging her poems in well-knit stanzas, Dickinson provides herself and us with a way of handling the things that disturb us most. The form of her poems provides the predictable pleasures of music through its rhymes and dance through its meter; at the same time, the content—the oppressive slant of winter light, the “granite lip” of the dead—delivers its unnerving message.