I stepped from plank to plank
So slow and cautiously;
The stars about my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.~Emily Dickinson
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch,—
This gave me that precarious gait
Some call experience.
This is a fascinating little poem. The central metaphor seems like a nautical one, but is the speaker referencing a pier? a ship? Without specifying, she still conveys a sense of precariousness. It sounds as if she’s up high–“the stars about my head I felt”–or at least feels as if she is, balanced above the sea. In just a few short lines, Dickinson manages to convey that tentative balancing act.
There’s something lovely about the notion of having one’s head in the stars, and I can’t help but think that Dickinson intends us to think this in addition to giving a sense of great height and precariousness. And the idea of feeling the stars…that is simply magical.
In the second stanza, the speaker conveys her uncertainty–she is inching forward, not knowing if’when she will lose her footing. It is this inching, this tentative advance, she says, that gives her the “precarious gait/Some call experience.”
How often do we look at those around us who are playing it safe and assume that they know what they’re doing, that they somehow “have it all together” because they’re not falling, when all they’re doing is inching along? Is it better to be cautious or to plunge forward into life, come what may?
The Emily Project 