Rethink.

“I dwell in Pos­si­bil­ity…” (657)
Emily Dick­in­son

I dwell in Pos­si­bil­ity -
A fairer House than Prose -
More numer­ous of Win­dows -
Supe­rior — for Doors -

Of Cham­bers as the Cedars -
Impreg­nable of Eye -
And for an Ever­last­ing Roof
The Gam­brels of the Sky -

Of Vis­i­tors — the fairest -
For Occu­pa­tion — This -
The spread­ing wide my nar­row Hands
To gather Paradise -

Com­ment:

“Pos­si­bil­ity” is a “fairer House than Prose:” it can­not be the fairest of dwellings because it is pos­si­bil­ity, after all. “The fairest” is reserved for vis­i­tors to this House, or even, given the ambi­gu­ity the dashes cre­ate, the activ­ity she engages in: “The spread­ing wide my nar­row Hands / To gather Paradise.”

The “House” is pecu­liar. Com­pared with “Prose,” we are tempted to think that it is poetry itself, with Dick­in­son address­ing us as poet. I think that inter­pre­ta­tion holds, but I really hate “the theme of this poem is about poetry” line of thought gen­er­ally, for this rea­son: a clever reader can make any poem to sound like a com­ment on poetry. Still, Dick­in­son men­tioned “Prose,” and that implic­itly brings up the theme of poetry.

But she doesn’t talk about poetry explic­itly — rather, this “House” is open to the air in two ways (“numer­ous of Win­dows,” “Gam­brels of the Sky”). When you add in the men­tion of Cedars, you won­der if this is a House at all. Prose might actu­ally be a House, trap­ping thought. The imagery here reminds one of the for­est as Cathe­dral, only “Gam­brels” is a term spe­cific to a barn’s roof. Using that term, she’s dis­counted any for­mal reli­gious imagery.

We won­der about the House as nat­ural. Poetry is still a House, of sorts. That it has more Win­dows allows more light to come in, but also allows the occu­pant at any given time to see more.

The doors are “supe­rior,” as they are “impreg­nable” as Cedars are: you can’t see through them. The end of Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” has the pro­tag­o­nist look­ing out at another build­ing, and see­ing in the win­dows what’s going on in each of the dif­fer­ent rooms. Each thing hap­pen­ing in each room is starkly dif­fer­ent from that hap­pen­ing in any other room. Pos­si­bil­ity means choice — when you make a choice, other pos­si­bil­i­ties are closed to you. The dif­fer­ence is between the “Cham­bers” (within) and the “Win­dows” (with­out): one must choose how to see, and while choices are not nec­es­sar­ily final, one choice does mean another can not be acted on at the same time.

The prob­lem of human vision causes our speaker to muse on what is above: “an Ever­last­ing Roof.” There is a view­point which sees all.

But what’s funny about the sky is that we see it, too. The “fairest” Vis­i­tor might as well be an angel — it is the visit to pos­si­bil­ity which makes one “fairest.” “This” is par­al­lel with “Prose” in the first stanza: whereas Prose was a sta­tic House, the noun “occu­pa­tion” strongly implies a verb, and we are given a dis­tinct descrip­tion of an action: “The spread­ing wide my nar­row Hands / To gather Par­adise.” “Spread­ing wide” implies wings, but what fas­ci­nates most is the “wide”/“narrow” dual­ity: the Hands, by them­selves, are nar­row. “Spread,” they’re wide.

This is not a poem nec­es­sar­ily about poetry when all is said — it is a poem that uses the idea of the speaker as poet to make a point about the nature of thought. Thoughts are pos­si­bil­i­ties: each one implies a per­spec­tive. To dwell in pos­si­bil­ity seems impos­si­ble, since to keep every thought alive all at once is impos­si­ble. Hence, “not-prose,” not merely thoughts stated as propo­si­tions, but some­thing more social, and some­thing ulti­mately mys­ti­cal. A way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing that brings the audi­ence to places you stood, and lets them see as you did, and lets them dis­cover for them­selves. The speaker actu­ally is dwelling in pos­si­bil­ity: the divine does indeed flow from the natural.

• Emily Dick­in­son, “Good to hide, and hear ‘em hunt!” (842)
• A Per­sonal Reac­tion to “These are the days when Birds come back,” poem #130 by Emily Dickinson
• Wis­dom and Rule: On Poem 343 of Emily Dick­in­son, “My Reward for Being”
• “If I can stop one heart from break­ing,” Emily Dickinson
• Emily Dick­in­son, “Each Sec­ond is the last” (879)

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