By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘They Shut Me up in Prose’, whilst not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems – it certainly isn’t up there with ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’, ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’, or ‘A narrow Fellow in the Grass’ – is nevertheless sometimes anthologised, and occasionally quoted for its suggestive opening line.
And few poets have known how to write a suggestive opening line better than Emily Dickinson. Here’s ‘They Shut Me up in Prose’ with some words of analysis.
Summary
They shut me up in Prose —
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me ‘still’ —
If prose is male, poetry is female – at least, in the rather reductive and old-fashioned binary that Emily Dickinson certainly would have been aware of, growing up in a Calvinist family in New England in the mid-nineteenth century. Prose is the form used by writers of ‘serious’ and weighty tracts, political pamphlets, biblical commentaries, and the laws of the land.
Poetry, by contrast, is concerned with emotion rather than intellect, and is seen as a more flighty and fanciful pursuit. In such a restrictive binary, poetry is more ‘feminine’ than prose, which is the mode used for rational and ‘weighty’ subjects. (Of course, such a binary is highly suspect: as if poetry never deals with anything weighty!)
Still! Could themself have peeped —
And seen my Brain — go round —
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason — in the Pound —
In the second stanza, the speaker of the poem mocks the idea that she could ever have been kept ‘still’. If those who sought to restrain her in the closet could have peeped inside her head and seen her brain whirling around at top speed, making all of its lightning connections, they’d have seen that their efforts to restrain her were as foolish as trying to imprison a bird in a ‘Pound’ or prison for the crime of treason.
Such an attempt is doubly foolish, we might say: because birds are incapable of the concept of ‘treason’, or crimes against the state, and because a bird locked in a pound would merely fly out of the window to its freedom.
Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity —
And laugh — No more have I —
The poem concludes with the idea of the bird (presumably this is what ‘Himself’ refers to) willing his escape, and flying free from his ‘Captivity’ in the ‘Pound’ or prison, as easily as a star – also up in the sky – is free from such things.
The bird is imagined laughing at how easy it is to break free from his confines, and Dickinson’s speaker sees her own escape from ‘their’ restrictions as being as laughably easy to achieve: all she has to do is will it, and it will be so.
Analysis
In her study of Dickinson’s poetry, the literary critic Helen Vendler draws an illuminating comparison between ‘They Shut Me up in Prose’ and another Dickinson poem, ‘I dwell in Possibility’. That poem begins, suggestively, with the two lines:
I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
Clearly, ‘Prose’ was viewed as plain, drab, and restrictive for Dickinson, and this idea is one she developed in ‘They Shut Me up in Prose’. The three lines which follow that arresting opening line give a clue to the links between poetry/prose and female/male:
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me ‘still’ —
‘Girl’ is the key word here, uneasily ‘rhymed’ with ‘still’ – itself enclosed, if not quite shut up, in those quotation marks. Prose is a way of getting little girls to toe the line and behave themselves: to make sure they are ‘seen and not heard’, as the old line has it.
And one of the triumphs of this poem about the restrictions placed upon young girls growing up in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society is the way in which Dickinson says one thing while using her verse to undermine it: ‘They shut me up in Prose’, she says in verse, with her trademark dashes suggesting quite the opposite of enclosure.
‘Prose’ and ‘Closet’ can hardly be called rhymes, and so fail to snap together with the satisfaction of a lock, although they are so near – close, we might say – to providing a full rhyme: Prose/Close.
‘Girl’ and ‘still’, as already noted, refuse to rhyme fully either, opening the poem out neither to the blandness of prose nor the anarchy of free verse. Indeed, Emily Dickinson was a pioneer of pararhyme, also known as half-rhyme or slant rhyme: that pairing of words whose sounds are similar, but not identical.
We can see this with the pararhyme of ‘Girl’ and ‘still’. They move assonantly towards each other, their final ‘l’ sounds uniting them, but ‘Girl’ refuses to sit still: it wriggles free.
And of course, Dickinson is not simply drawing a link between gender and writing here: she’s saying that female writers face a completely different set of obstacles from those men face.
An autobiographical poem?
To what extent might ‘They Shut Me up in Prose’ be regarded as autobiographical: as a reflection of Dickinson’s own experiences, and her own feelings towards her childhood? In her own lifetime, Emily Dickinson was far better known as gardener than as a poet; she barely published any of her work, with much of it only seeing the light of day after her death in 1886. It wasn’t unheard-of for girls to be told that writing was not for them.
Certainly, Dickinson’s own childhood was hardly inspiring: her parents were not artistic, and her strict religious upbringing must have made her feel ‘shut up’, restricted, from the start.
And there is deliberate double meaning in that opening line: ‘They shut me up in Prose’ means not only ‘they imprison me in a world of commonplace dullness’ but also ‘they silence me with their prosaic lectures and sermons’.
But there’s no shutting up Emily Dickinson. If they had peeped inside and seen her brain working overtime, and glimpsed the imagination and creativity within, they would have realised that to try to keep her shut up was as futile as shutting up a bird in a pound (for ‘Treason’: itself an absurd idea), because a bird can easily escape a pound by flying off, as easily as a star ‘flying’ free in the night sky.
Flight is key here: as with Keats’s imagination in his ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the sky’s the limit.
Form
‘They Shut Me up in Prose’ is written largely in iambic trimeter, which means there are three iambs (a foot comprising a lightly stressed syllable followed by a heavily stressed one) in each line: ‘They SHUT me UP in PROSE – / As WHEN a LIT-tle GIRL’.