As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still” –
Still! Could themself have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason – in the Pound –Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Look down opon Captivity –
And laugh – No more have I –
Link to EDA manuscript. Originally in Packet XXXIV, Fascicle 21, ca. 1862. First published in Unpublished Poems (1935), 34, with the alternative not adopted. Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
This poem of defiance and resistance employs some of the imagery we have seen in earlier poems in this group. It implies that female genius cannot express itself without struggle. The speaker, identifiable as a “girl,” is “shut up,” with the double meaning of made silent and locked into a room defined as “Prose.” This could refer to the prosaic expectations of women in her small town, chained to domesticity, subservience and humility, or the denial of her intellect imaged as her restless “Brain,” obstacles other women of genius experienced as well. Although it has been suggested that this poem describes a traumatic childhood experience of Dickinson’s, we have no definitive evidence of it. We do know, from their biographies, that George Sand (1804-1876), pen name for the French author Aurore Dudevant, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), the English poet, both favorites of Dickinson, suffered restraint and repression of their gifts in their childhoods.
There is also bird and crime imagery here. The physical captivity of the girl’s body cannot fetter her mind or spirit, which she compares to the attempt to keep a bird “For Treason – in the Pound.” According to Dickinson’s Webster’s,
Treason is the highest crime of a civil nature of which a man can be guilty.
It is a deliberate flouting and betrayal of the government, of patriarchal rule. Despite the speaker’s defiance, birds, which Dickinson connects with the artist figure, can be captured: the caged bird was a frequent symbol of women imprisoned by marriage. Still, the bird in this instance looks down from a height and laughs at “Captivity,” just as the speaker does, or wishes to do.
Dickinson copied this poem into Fascicle 21 during 1862 (the year after Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death, we might note), and it appeared on the left hand page opposite another poem relevant to our week’s theme. “This was a Poet – It is That” (F446A, J448) describes the process of genius, how the poet (referred to here as “He” but in many ways resembling Dickinson)
Distills amazing sense From Ordinary Meanings –
And Attar so immense.
My best friend has a deep abiding love for Emily Dickinson. When she was younger she plastered her walls and doors and desk and everything with quotes – she still loves quotes – and on her door she had pinned up Dickinson’s “Nobody.” I must have read it dozens if not hundreds of times. I’m not going to analyze “Nobody” today, because I’m sure everyone had to read it in school at some point and because I’ve thought a lot of thoughts of it in my life. Instead, here’s a Dickinson work that I really like – “They shut me up in Prose.”
Here’s the text –
BY EMILY DICKINSON
They shut me up in Prose –
They put me in the Closet –
Because they liked me “still” –
Still! Could themself have peeped –
And seen my Brain – go round –
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason – in the Pound –
Look down opon Captivity –
And laugh – No more have I –
By Dr Oliver Tearle
‘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.) Before we proceed to an analysis of the poem, here’s the text of ‘They shut me up in Prose’.
They shut me up in Prose — As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me ‘still’ —
Still! Could themself have peeped — And seen my Brain — go round — They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason — in the Pound —
Himself has but to will And easy as a Star Abolish his Captivity —
And laugh — No more have I —
‘They shut me up in Prose’. 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. 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’ —
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.
They shut me up in Prose — As when a little Girl They put me in the Closet —
Because they liked me ‘still’ —
‘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. They move assonantly towards each other, 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.
In her own lifetime, as we’ve observed before, 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.
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.