YOU cannot put a fire out;
A thing that can ignite
Can go, itself, without a fan
Upon the slowest night.

You cannot fold a flood
And put it in a drawer,—
Because the winds would find it out,
And tell your cedar floor.

~Emily Dickinson

What a weird and wondrous little poem. “You cannot put a fire out”? But you can. I’m not initially sure what Dickinson is getting at here. She begins by saying you can’t put out a fire, but goes on to say that a thing that can ignite can burn without help. I’m not sure how these two ideas are connected, besides both being about fire.

In the second stanza, she goes on to say that you cannot “fold a flood” and put it away. This makes more sense. But then she gives her reason–you can’t do this because the winds would find out and tell your floor? The “cedar” here feels forced, thrown in for the sake of the rhyme and nothing else.

What is this poem about? Dickinson seems to be saying that certain things are irrevocable–once out in the world, they cannot be taken back. Fire can burn unchecked once started, can rage out of control. Floods, too, cannot be controlled. I wonder if what she’s really talking about here is speech, language. Once said, a word cannot be unsaid. It can rage like a fire or a flood, and its originator can do nothing to check its spread. The winds telling the floor could be the power of rumor, the tendency of spoken words to spread beyond the speaker’s intended audience.