On 520 ("I Started Early–Took My Dog–") Essay, Research Paper

YVOR WINTERS

The problem of judging [Emily Dickinson's] better poems is much of the time a subtle

one. Her meter, at its worst—that is, most of the time—is a kind of stiff

sing-song; her diction, at its worst, is a kind of poetic nursery jargon; and there is a

remarkable continuity of manner, of a kind nearly indescribable, between her worst and her

best poems. ["I like to see it lap the Miles"] will illustrate the defects in

perfection. . . . /283/ The poem is abominable; and the quality of silly playfulness which

renders it abominable is diffused more or less perceptibly throughout most of her work,

and this diffusion is facilitated by the limited range of her metrical schemes.

The difficulty is this: that even in her most nearly perfect poems, even in those poems

in which the defects do not intrude momentarily in a crudely obvious form, one is likely

to feel a fine trace of her countrified eccentricity; there is nearly always a margin of

ambiguity in our final estimate of even her most extraordinary work, and though the margin

may appear to diminish or disappear in a given reading of a favorite poem, one feels no

certainty that it will not reappear more obviously with the next reading. Her best poems,

quite unlike the best poems of Ben Jonson, of George Herbert, or of Thomas Hardy, can

never be isolated certainly and defensibly from her defects; yet she is a poetic genius of

the highest order, and this ambiguity in one’s feeling about her is profoundly disturbing.

["I started Early—Took my Dog"] is a fairly obvious illustration. . . .

/284/

The mannerisms are nearly as marked as in the first poem, but whereas the first poem

was purely descriptive, this poem is allegorical and contains beneath the more or less

mannered surface an ominously serious theme, so that the manner appears in a new light and

is somewhat altered in effect. The sea is here the traditional symbol of death; that is,

of all the forces and quali- /285/ ties in nature and in human nature which tend toward

the dissolution of human character and consciousness. The playful protagonist, the simple

village maiden, though she speaks again in the first person, is dramatized, as if seen

from without, and her playfulness is somewhat restrained and formalized. Does this

formalization, this dramatization, combined with a major symbolism, suffice effectually to

transmute in this poem the quality discerned in the first poem, or does that quality

linger as a fine defect? The poem is a poem of power; it may even be a great poem; but

this is not to answer the question. I have never been able to answer the question. /286/

from "Emily Dickinson and the Limits of Judgement," In Defense of Reason,

3rd ed. (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947), pp. 283-299.

KATE FLORES

The poem by Emily Dickinson "I started early, took my dog" has been

rather misinterpreted, in my opinion. Mr. Yvor Winters . . . regards this poem as a poem

about death. "The sea is here the traditional symbol of death," he states;

"that is, of all the forces and qualities in nature and in human nature which tend

toward the dissolution of human character and consciousness." Mr. George F. Whicher,

on the other hand, in his biography This Was A Poet, describes this poem in the

chapter entitled "American Humor" as written "in a spirit of pure

fantasy."

While in certain of Emily Dickinson’s later poems the sea may symbolize death

("Fortitude incarnate Here is laid away In the swift partitions Of the awful

sea"), in this early poem the sea can hardly be so understood. Nor is this poem pure

fantasy, or humorous in any sense. Rather I suggest it is a study in fear, fear of love,

of which the sea is here the symbol, as it is in a number of early poems ("My

river," "Wild night").

The narrator describes an early visit to the sea, the word "early" having the

double sense of early in life and early in the morning, before the awakening of her

family: the adventure is a vicarious escape from her repressive environment, her

"solid town," as she calls it in the last stanza, thus contrasting its safe

solidity with the terrifying fluidity of the sea. She goes not only early but alone, with

only her dog to guide her "simple shoe," apparently expecting to return from

what is merely to be a "visit"—thus a note of apprehension even in the

seemingly carefree opening lines.

To one who "never saw the sea," something of its strangeness, its essentially

mythical, inaccessible and hostile quality is conveyed in the lines "The mermaids in

the basement Came out to look at me." Mermaids, those legendary creatures who live in

the sea, come not to greet their visitor but to "look at" her, an inimical

gesture to one who wished never to be looked at, or even seen. (One recalls the protest:

"Creation seemed a mighty crack To make me visible.") The limp extended hands of

the sixth line are a typical Dickinsonian self-projection, as is the mouse aground upon

the sands: a self-portrait of timidity. And there is undoubtedly a wistful contrast here

between the legless semi-animal mermaids who are so at home in the sea and the human

visitor drawn toward the sea but able only to stand transfixed upon its shores.

The phrase "But no man moved me" at the beginning of the third stanza may be

read quite literally, I think, the word "moved" having both an emotional and a

purely physical connotation: the poet cannot be moved from the spot where she stands

immobilized with dread and longing; whereupon the sea advances toward her, rising past her

feet to her knees, her waist and finally her breast, and threatening at last to overwhelm

her completely by engulfing her head. Thus the poet’s fear of the sea is based upon the

very excessiveness of its power to undo her. It is at this point, when her whole being

seems endangered, that she succeeds, by the strength of her intellect, her will, in

turning to go. For the sea which she had so blithely set out to visit she now seeks to

flee; and it is in abject terror—conveyed with great power in the repetition of the

word "he" in the fifth stanza—that she finds it in close pursuit, treading

her ankle with its "silver heel"—the sensation is of spine-chilling horror.

The phrase "no man he seemed to know" would appear to refer merely to the

desperation of the sea’s pursuit; but the poet too in her blind terror of the sea can know

no man. This obliviousness, in their mutual concern with each other, of sea and poet, ends

with their arrival back to her rigid home environment which, restraintful as it is of the

wildest seas, seas which in fact range within the poet herself, she now finds to be a

sanctuary. And as she retreats there, proud of the sea’s "mighty look" of

amazement at her power—a look which she must surely return—it seems clear that

she will never venture forth again.

from "Dickinson’s ‘I Started Early–Took my Dog,’" The Explicator,

IX (May, 1951), Item 47.

LAURENCE PERRINE

Both Yvor Winters and Kate Flores . . . load Emily Dickinson’s "I Started Early,

Took My Dog" with a weight of meaning, symbolism, and emotion which this wholly

delightful bit of poetic fancy simply will not bear. Yvor Winters regards the poem as

being about death, of which the sea is the symbol. Kate Flores regards it as "a study

in fear, fear of love, of which the sea . . . is the symbol."

But the imagery and the whole tone of the poem are playful and marked with

characteristic Dickinsonian whimsy: the sea is divided into basement and upper story, the

mermaids peer out in curiosity, the friendly frigates extend their ropes like "hempen

hands" for the little "mouse" to run up. I simply cannot find "a note

of apprehension" in the opening stanza, a "hostile quality" in the

curiosity of the mermaids, "abject terror" in the repetition of the word

"he" in the fifth stanza, or "spine-chilling horror" in the

imaginative metaphor of the sea’s "silver heel" upon the poet’s ankle

(especially when followed by the fanciful and beautiful image of her shoes overflowing

with "pearl"). Nor anything at all about love or death.

The poet is describing a morning walk to the sea—real or imaginary. She captures

the wonder and freshness of it and indulges in poetic fancy. The fear in the poem is

mock-fear. When the sea makes as if it would gobble Emily up ”as wholly as a dew upon a

dandelion’s sleeve," she feigns terror. But the delicacy of the figure tells us that

we must not take this seriously, that she is only acting out a little play. The play is

concluded in the last stanza with the mock-solemnity of the sea’s formal bow and

withdrawal. This is Ruskin’s "fallacy of the willful fancy," not "pathetic

fallacy."

from "Dickinson’s ‘I Started Early–Took my Dog,’" The Explicator, X

(Feb. 1952), Item 28.

ERIC W. CARLSON

Two earlier interpretations have left unresolved the question of the basic meaning of

this poem. One view [Perrine's] maintains that by means of metaphor, playful whimsy, and

mock-fear, but not symbolism, the poem simply presents the wonder and freshness of a

morning walk to the sea; it has nothing to do with love and death. The other reading

[Flores'] sees the poem as a study of fear, the fear of love, the whole episode

dramatizing a vicarious escape from the repressive environment of the "solid

town." When the sea threatens to engulf her, the speaker is terrified, but by her

strength of will and intellect, she succeeds in returning to the safety of her rigid home

environment.

As I see it, the poem is less a study of fear and abject terror as such than a

dramatization of the frightening realization that toying with love may arouse a tide of

emotion too powerful to control, or at least threateningly high for the timid or

inexperienced, or for the individual who, however desirous of self-fulfillment, fears the

loss of self-identity and retreats behind the protective seawall of social habit and

custom. Even such a restatement of the basic idea over-simplifies, for within the

narrative the ambivalent attitude toward the sea lasts to the very end: from the curiosity

and the playful interest in the possibility of romantic love, in the first two stanzas,

through the nearly full tide of emotion and the consequent fear of being overwhelmed by a

devouring love, to the lingering pleasure and desire suggested by "his silver

heel" and "pearl" and "bowing . . . with a mighty look."

That "mighty look" is unforgettable and, along with the mermaids and hempen

hands, suggests a power greater than that of romantic love, despite the whimsical

personification of the tide as a polite gentleman. Ordinary prudence ("took my

dog") is no safeguard against the subtle enticements and the tidal flow that slowly

enfolds man in its embrace until his very individuality is threatened with extinction.

Similar in its mystic appeal is the haunting call of the thrush music in the

"pillared dark" of Robert Frost’s "Come In." In Frost’s poem the

counterforce of ideal purpose is sufficient to offset the mystic call, whereas here the

speaker is saved by her sudden realization that the sea is no friendly lover: despite the

lingering pleasure of its touch ("I felt his silver heel"), Nature is a stranger

to civilized human values ("the solid town"). In another poem, "The Waters

Chased Him As He Fled" (No.1749 in the Johnson ed.), the sea again personifies death,

physical death only, but the conscious irony is too flat and stark to parallel the emotive

symbolic overtones of "I Started Early. " "The Masthead" in Moby

Dick offers a better parallel: despite its softly undulating waves and its

"magnanimity," the sea drowns and destroys indifferently. In mystic surrender to

Nature, Melville and Dickinson seem to say, lies the most insidious threat—the loss

of self-identity. On this level of meaning, Dickinson’s poem implies a power in Nature

greater than and different from the power of romantic love. What seems, at first,

alluringly romantic turns out to be a matter of life or death.

from "Dickinson’s ‘I Started Early–Took my Dog,’" The Explicator,

XX (May, 1962), Item 72.

Cristanne Miller

My favorite among Dickinson’s multiple unexpected changes in verb

tense occurs in the deceptively innocent "I started Early—Took my Dog– / And

visited the Sea–" (520). Here the speaker presents herself as walking quietly by the

sea, seeing its landscape, in childish metaphors, until stanza 3 . . . .[There the] sudden

introduction of the conditional "Would," however, gives the speaker away, This

auxiliary changes the mood of the verb and of the poem: what seemed a single action in the

past now seems to be either a hypothetical or a customary, repeated action. The speaker’s

tale becomes a sexual fantasy–repeated either in her imagining of what it would be like

to walk by what she sees as a masculine and therefore dangerous sea, or in her imagination

as she in fact walks by the sea, or in her metaphorical representation of real dealings

with the world of men. The speaker teases the reader, and perhaps herself, just as much as

she does the sea/Man. She pretends to be entirely innocent in her motives for going to the

sea (walking the dog) and then repeatedly lets it touch her to the point of mutual arousal

before she runs away to the "Solid Town." The last lines of the poem give the

sea dignity in his lovely but otherwise undignified chase and underline the sexual content

of the poem:

Until we met the Solid Town–

No One He seemed to know–

And bowing–with a Mighty look—

At me–The Sea Withdrew–

As with Dickinson’s mixture of past and present tenses in other poems, her combination

of differing verb tense and mood in this narrative, remove it from any simple, temporal

context. The poet does not let us place her speaker easily, and the speaker is allowed her

coy retreat to apparent innocence and safety.

Dickinson’s gravitation toward the simple (habitual) present and toward the uninflected

verb may suggest her overriding concern to escape the historicity of time, to make herself

in some way timeless and thus safe from the forces of death and loss she feels . . .

strongly . . . It seems to me, however, that these verb forms (and Dickinson’s poems)

point more toward a concern with ongoing process, revelation, continuous perception, and

change than toward the lyric suspension exemplified by the dancers on Keats’s Grecian urn

or the predictable return of Wordsworth’s "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern

Abbey," The teasing disappearance of Dickinson’s verbs from any single time or person

repeats itself in her experiments with other parts of speech, and in the narratives of her

poems generally. . . .

From Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar. Copyright ? 1987 by Harvard

University Press.

Kenneth Stocks

James Reeves, in his introduction to his selection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, says of

this ‘extraordinary and tantalizing poem’ (as he describes it): ‘It is evident that here

the sea represents some overwhelming force, of great destructive power. . . .What begins

in a playful vein concludes as a pursuit to the death. It is only when she reaches the

solid familiarity of home, the reassurance of the town she knows so well, that the pursuit

ends.’

I am not sure about the appropriateness of the term ‘playful’ as applied to

the beginning of the poem. The lightness of the opening (light rather than playful) is an

integral and calculated part of the serious purpose of the whole, and introduces several

essential properties of the poem. Perhaps we can interpret the ‘Mermaids in the

Basement’ as the deluding phantoms or sirens of the deep, luring to destruction; and

the ‘Frigates in the Upper Floor’ as the great masters, a Dante, a Shakespeare,

who have plumbed and mastered the depths of human experience and can safely ride the deep,

extending ‘Hempen Hands’ to the small isolated figure caught up in the destructive

elements. Even the dog, which enters the poem only to disappear from it immediately, has

its significance — the significance is perhaps in the disappearance itself, the

breakdown, when the situation begins to get serious, of the substitute companionship (’no

Man moved Me’) demanded of the dog in the absence of the real human companionships and

support that the town might provide.

‘The solid familiarity of home, the reassurance of the town she knows so well’ — yes,

but of course the poet’s real relationships with the ‘Solid Town’ were more complex than

that; it is not a mere homesick child who is heading for the town after receiving a bad

fright which any sympathetic adult can help to dispel, though the poem does seem to be

cast in that familiar mould. The ‘Dog’, the ‘Mermaids’, the ‘Frigates’, the ‘Mouse’, the

‘Apron,’ ‘Belt’ and ‘Bodice’, the ‘Silver Heel’, the ‘Shoes’ overflowing with

‘Pearl’, the bad fright and the race for home — all these seem to form a familiar age-old

pattern, though given a new content and depth of meaning. If the relics of childhood are

still present though transcended in the poem, that only adds to the poem’s profound

insight, expressing an abiding reality of the human consciousness. . . .[T]he picture

presented in the poem, of the poet alone with her dog outside the town’s limits, pursued

by the rising tide of consciousness or (to change the metaphor to that of another of her

poems) by ‘That awful stranger Consciousness’, the presence whom she is trying to exorcise

or master through the return to the town.

From Emily Dickinson and the Modern Consciousness: A Poet of Our Time. New York:

St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Copyright ? 1988 by the estate of Kenneth Stocks.

Lynn Shakinovsky

Poem 520 — concerns itself, on the one hand, with the play of power

between the female narrator and the Sea who is figured as male and, on the other, with the

private internal world of the narrator, the workings of whose mind remain fundamentally

inaccessible to the reader. "I started Early — took my Dog — " begins as

conventionally as any narrative could but moves quickly into the bizarre, private world of

the narrator.

[. . . .]

The apparent simplicity and conventionality of the beginning of the poem

belies the complexities and obscurities of the universe into which we are suddenly thrust.

The sense of cosy domesticity, created in the opening line of the poem by the description

of the narrator taking her Dog for a walk and potentially maintained by the comparison of

the Sea to a House, is undermined by the fact that it is Mermaids who live in the House’s

Basement, and that the Sea transforms into a Man later in the poem, a transformation which

is not elucidated or clarified. Similarly, the Dog which originally appears to symbolize

normality, ordinariness, and domesticity disappears out of the poem after the first line

and is not seen again. Thus, even these apparent indicators of normality and ordinariness

betray the reader and force her to question the framework in which the poem occurs.

In the second stanza, the Frigates are personified and fantasize the

narrator as a "Mouse — / Aground," implying that she should somehow be living

in the Sea-House in the first place. The surreal spatial dislocations in the poem are

playful and teasing, and the whimsicality and strangeness of the poem deny us a framework

with which to read it. We find ourselves in a poetic universe where the poem seems to move

from one metaphor to another without ever illuminating the connections between them.

The welcoming, "extend[ing]" hands of the Frigate are not

entirely friendly and contain a slight sense of threat, as "Hempen" implies the

possibility of trapping, tying, and strangling. This threat is made explicit as the Sea

turns into a Man who follows the narrator, which serves to sexualize the image. The sense

of increasing encroachment conveyed in the repetitions of "and" in the third

stanza, and of personal threat contained in the repetition of "my" in the same

stanza, reach their climax in "And made as He

would eat me up." The threat here is that the narrator will be incorporated into the

Sea and swallowed up just as "a Dew" might

be. The relative size and impact of a drop of dew in relation to the ocean also serves to

indicate the narrator’s sense of her own

powerlessness and fear of ravishment.

In contrast to the narrator’s sense of helplessness, the Sea’s power and

competence is conveyed throughout the poem. The

transitional movement from the world of sexual excitement to the solid world of

respectability, imaged by the contrast between

the liquid richness of the Sea and the solidity of the Town, is perfectly managed by the

Sea and conveyed in the narrative by the

social nicety of the phrase "No one He seemed to know — ." His power is

conveyed again by the idea of control and choice

that is implicit in the fact that his withdrawal at the end of the poem is presented not

only as voluntary but also as temporary. In

turn, the narrator’s sense of the Sea’s control over her is conveyed through the

meaningfulness and intimacy of the "Mighty look

– " which he directs at her.

What is also evident, however, is the narrator’s excitement. It is

conveyed as early as the opening line of the poem, as it is she who originally chooses to

visit the Sea. In this sense, the action of the poem is "started" by the

narrator ("I started Early — Took my Dog — "), and her excitement is also

present in the later repetition "And then — I started — too." The repetitions

of "He" in the fifth stanza, the intimacy of the Silver Heel upon the

"Ancle," the liquidity and richness of "Pearl," and the strong

staccato rhythms of the poem in general, all function together to convey the narrator’s

sexual excitement.

Indeed, the sense of the narrator’s fantasy pervades the poem. The poem is

filled with whimsy and pretence and functions as

a world of make-believe. Even the Sea appears to possess the capacity to play; "And

made as He would eat me up — ." The

poem works so subjectively and in such a freely associative manner that the reader

eventually gives up her expectations of a

rational framework and accepts the strange transitions from concept to concept and from

metaphor to metaphor. The central

tenet of free association is, however, its private nature. Many of the connections in this

poem remain unexplained or seem

meaningful only in the narrator’s private symbolic world. The movement from Dog to Mermaid

to Mouse to personified

Dandelion remains whimsical and private.

Since the meanings of the poem are elucidated mainly by reference to the

narrator’s private symbolic world, they may be said to remain closed to us. The phrase

"Took my Dog" exemplifies this point. Usually, the notion of taking one’s dog

implies normalcy, domesticity, and companionship, but all of these factors are absent by

the middle of the first stanza. The narrator’s

experience is characterised by the notable absence of notions such as normalcy or

domesticity and remains strange, unexplained, and at times frightening. Indeed, her

experience is dependent upon a sense of isolation and lack of companionship,

so that the Dog not only fails to protect her but disappears inexplicably after the

opening line. Thus, in spite of the intimacy

present in the possessive pronoun "My," the connection between the narrator and

her dog is never explained.

An attempt to work out the narrator’s relationship with the Sea is equally

complex. The Sea is imaged first as a House or a

building which is inhabited, and then as a Man. It is easy to explain the threatening,

engulfing, overwhelming effect that the Sea

has on the narrator as it follows her, but all of this tends to contradict the idea of

shelter, domesticity and immobility usually

implied by the image of a building. In a discussion of Dickinson’s symbols, Weisbuch

comments that the Sea tends to be "the

place of risk," while home is "almost always a place of safety and rest"

(53). In fact, Weisbuch is actually commenting, at this

point in his discussion, on the difficulty of attributing precise meanings to Dickinson’s

symbols, but it is interesting to note that

even the kind of wide-ranging opposition that he suggests here is contradicted in this

poem. The poem continually subverts and

undermines the associations and connotations that it creates.

The poem’s irrational world never does provide its own containing framework. The lack of

control is manifested in the

overflowing tide, the absence of clarifying or containing connectives, and in the lack of

a clear framework inside which one can

read this poem. The only kind of framework that can exist is one that may be arbitrarily

imposed — by the poem’s ending, for

example. This poem ends without telling the end of the story: the sense that there will be

another confrontation with the Sea is

strong. Thus, Dickinson refuses to bind her meanings or to circumscribe her universe.

"I started Early — Took my Dog" takes

for its subject matter the irrationality of free association, the private nature of the

internal symbolic universe, and it explores both

of these in the context of an unexplained confrontation with male power. The evasiveness

manifested by the narrator inside the

poem finds its formal concomitant in the relative inaccessibility of the poem itself. The

difficulties inside the poem appear to

reflect the difficulties outside the poem, the difficulties for a woman writer of being

received in the public external world.

from "No Frame of Reference: The Absence of Context in Emily

Dickinson’s Poetry." The Emily Dickinson Journal Vol. III.2 (1996). Online

source: http://www.colorado.edu/EDIS/journal/articles/III.2.Shakinovsky.html