There's no doubt about it: Dickinson is most definitely a poetic "wild card". Poetry in and of itself is abstract and not always simple to interpret, and in Emily Dickinson's case, this is more often than not the case. Most of Dickinson's poetry is delightfully vague, and in this way so beautiful and noteworthy because of its ability to capture us in our quest to determine the one main idea or argument present in one of her poems (even though several interpretations of each poem usually result).
Poem #225 is one such poem with a great deal of ambiguity that challenges us, forcing us to pay attention to each and every word and phrase and the possible connections or contrasts between them. In this particular poem, the poet speaker seems to be speaking of the various identities a woman possesses during her lifetime, from being a "girl" to a "wife" to a "woman." Girlhood seems to be contrasted with womanhood in a retrospective fashion, and the poet speaker conveys that one is more comfortable or painful than the other (as we notice in the lines, "This being comfort- then- That other kind- was pain..." (1667), yet doesn't make clear to us which one is which. What is also unclear is the potential relationship status of the poet speaker. In the beginning, she says, "I'm wife"- I've finished that- That other state" (in which once again the antecedent is not clear), but then goes on to say, "I'm Czar- I'm "Woman" now- It's safer so..." Even in this introductory stanza, it is unclear to us whether she is married or unmarried, feeling dependent or strong and independent. Dickinson even seems to undermine the whole contemplation she has of these various identities she has or has had as a woman at the end, too, when says, "I'm "Wife"! Stop there!", seemingly dismissing all of the thoughts she has stirred up in her head regarding the subject. This touch of irony is intriguing and keeps us thinking, and is in my opinion, a great ending to the poem for this very reason.
While at once intriguing and thematically-frustrating, Dickinson's work seems to remind us that we don't always necessarily need one clear-cut answer when we read poetry. Sometimes, the beauty of reading poetry doesn't necessarily lie in our ability to determine its meaning, but instead in our inability to find one right answer. With Dickinson's work, the beauty of the work lies in its ability to confuse us.
I agree with this Ali, and some of her poems I feel I will never really make sense of. I think her best poems don't necessarily present multiple means that we can't ultimately make cohere, but that are ambiguous in self-supporting ways. Think of "Success is counted sweetest." It may be about war and the battlefield, or it may be about what it means to be denied access to Heaven or God's grace. These at first seem like irreconcilable readings, but I think that they can actually be reconciled, seen as two related examples of the same more abstract idea, or as actually about the problem of dying, of wondering whether you are going to be victorious. At some point you will know. With 225, we can reconcile some of the ambiguities if we assume just 2 conditions, being wife and being girl. And yet, we might think of the condition of being wife as both a condition of being a woman in the here and now, but also perhaps in the afterlife, as a wife of Christ, or something like that. It's best, I think, to aim to achieve a unified reading by adding up as many disparate meanings as one can. Sometimes we can't find the unified meaning, or a complete meaning (the latter is harder), but we should proceed as though it is possible for as long as we can.
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