Meter in "477"

My favorite poem in our second selection of Dickinson's works is "477." I love the use of the vague pronoun "He" at the beginning which can be interpreted a multitude of ways, but the most obvious to me was God. The language was also vivid and unique, with God fumbling at your soul, preparing your bitter nature, and then scalping your naked soul with a thunderbolt. I also loved the musicality of the alternate rhyming lines in the quatrains, driving the poem forward. While imagery and rhyme are aspects I regularly pay attention to in poetry, today's class made me realize I had been neglecting meter as I read Dickinson's poetry and was therefore missing a huge aspect of her poetry. In this particular poem, the quatrains are laid out in two lines of iambic trimeter, one line of iambic tetrameter, and one line of iambic trimeter again. The first lines of the second and third stanzas each contain an extra unstressed syllable at the end, but this does not really alter the flow of the meter. Also the quatrains rhyme abcb and there are 14 lines in the poem, leading me to read it as a sonnet of sorts though the rhyme scheme and meter are unusual. This repetitive meter creates a flow to the poem that pushes you along as God judges your soul and prepares you either for Heaven or Hell.

The final two lines constitute the poem's turn, as the subject switches from the soul and God to nature: "When Winds hold Forests in their Paws - / The Universe - is still -" The change from four lines to two lines emphasizes the abrupt "stillness" imposed by the last line of the poem, as we expect the pattern to complete itself. Instead we are left with sudden stillness, as though we are awaiting God's judgement or as though the soul has officially departed from the Earth. We do get closure, however, in the meter of these last two lines. The 11th line is iambic tetrameter while the 12th is iambic trimeter, mimicking the form of the last two lines of each prior quatrain. Therefore, we are not left with the metric cliffhanger that two lines of trimeter (like the opening of a new quatrain) would have caused. The choice to end with tetrameter and trimeter brings about this sense of closure and acceptance that the soul has left this world and whatever God willed has been done.

I'm really glad meter was mentioned in class today because paying attention to it helped me find greater or clearer meanings in several of Dickinson's remaining poems.