’T WAS such a little, little boat
~Emily Dickinson
That toddled down the bay!
’T was such a gallant, gallant sea
That beckoned it away!
’T was such a greedy, greedy wave
That licked it from the coast;
Nor ever guessed the stately sails
My little craft was lost!
Since this is Dickinson, and therefore the boat could be anything from a heart to a soul to a life to a dream, and since I didn’t plan my day out very well and am pressed for time, I’m going to sidestep meaning and focus on Dickinson’s word choice.
It’s the repetition here that really interests me. “Little, little,” “gallant, gallant,” and “greedy, greedy” are all two-syllable words. “Little” and “greedy” are words a child would know (and “gallant” is definitely a word that child-Emily would have known). (I’m not sure why the sea is “gallant”–could this be an emulation of the childlike tendency to misunderstand words? The sea is hardly actually gallant if it is involved in the boat’s demise.) The repetition of these short words in one small poem gives it a childlike quality–it almost sounds as if the boat is a child’s toy. Anyone who’s ever sailed a toy boat will agree that they often “toddle” rather than taking to the water like swans. After it “toddled down the bay,” the boat takes no further action–it is acted upon. It is beckoned away, licked from the coast, and lost. In the last line, Dickinson uses “little” a third time. The use of the same generic adjective three times in eight lines adds to the childish quality.
The “stately sails” that don’t notice the loss of the small craft are like adults who don’t notice or honor the force of the loss children feel. When we are very young, our hearts are broken time and again, sometimes by big things, but often by tiny ones. As adults, it’s all too easy to forget this, to say condescendingly, “It’s not the end of the world,” when to the child’s mind it is, and no adult perspective matters, can soothe the pain of loss.
Whatever the boat stands in for–whatever’s been lost–the speaker’s reaction to it is like a child’s–simple, devastated, emotional. I think in a way that’s how loss hits all of us. I think of adults I’ve known who’ve lost their parents and said, “I’m an orphan.” It doesn’t matter that they’re sixty or seventy–the loss hits them hard, strikes at them in a way that makes them feel suddenly small, young, powerless. In the face of loss, we all become childlike, adrift in the wide, wide world.
The Emily Project 