WITHIN my reach!
~Emily Dickinson
I could have touched!
I might have chanced that way!
Soft sauntered through the village,
Sauntered as soft away!
So unsuspected violets
Within the fields lie low,
Too late for striving fingers
That passed, an hour ago.
One of the loveliest moments you get to have as an English teacher is the one when you tell your students that, now that they’ve learned and mastered the rules, they get to break the rules. This is a lovely example of rule-breaking. Dickinson’s incomplete sentences here are perfect. The first line has no verb. The second has no object. The fourth and fifth have no subject. She’s breaking things all over the place. After setting up the rhythm and maintaining it for four lines, she disrupts it in the fifth. The rhyme scheme is broken, too–and it can hardly help but be, in a nine-line poem. Who writes a nine-line poem??
Dickinson never identifies the subject of the poem, either. We really have no idea who or what was within her reach. She compares it/them to violets–but we don’t know much else. This also feels like a massive rule-breaking. If you’re going to write words, people should be able to read them and know what you’re talking about, right? I mean, it’s Dickinson, so this could definitely be a poem about death….But.
On second read, the poem strikes me as masterful. Dickinson breaks all these rules, and the incompleteness of the rhyme scheme, the missing words, the lack of a clearly identified subject, all underscore with a quiet sort of fierceness the idea of missing something, and being incomplete or unfulfilled as a result.
Emily Dickinson FOMO.
Okay, maybe not really that, but what the poem seems to be about, more than whoever or whatever the speaker just missed, is the sobering reality that life is full of missed opportunities. Maybe the speaker doesn’t name her subject because, like the rest of us, she doesn’t know what she’s missed.
The Emily Project 