Name: How Emily Dickinson Writes A Poem
Uploaded: 2026-02-10T17:22:01.000Z
Duration: 7 min 40 s
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Adverbs of degree

Success in circuit lies too bright for hour infirm delight the truth superb surprise as lightning to the children eased with explanation kind.

Modal verbs - B1

The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.

Of all the poems of Emily Dickinson, it's a little funny that this one feels so direct.

Dickinson is known for work that's full of ambiguity, odd manipulations in meter and rhyme, images that seem mysterious and sometimes out of place.

In other words, poetry that puts into practice the very philosophy that's seemingly laid out here in perfect meter and matching rhymes.

It strikes me as odd that the poem which best describes this philosophy is one in which she abandons it on first read.

It appears that Dickinson is so intent on getting her point across that she repeats it four times.

First in line one, the most naked assertion.

She implores, tell the whole truth, but tell it indirectly.

Then in line two, she says this another way.

Success in telling the truth lies in a circuitous journey, not a direct one.

In lines three and four, she describes the failure of that direct approach.

The surprise of direct truth is too bright for our weak and unstable capacity for delight.

It will, in other words, short circuit us.

And finally, in lines five through eight, she hammers home the point, again using lightning as a metaphor.

The apprehension of truth must be gradual, she says, like a parent's explanation of lightning to children, rather than the lightning itself, which, if looked at directly, would blind the viewer.

After these four phrasings, the meaning could not be more clear.

The truth is something worth telling the world, but it can't be presented head on.

It must come at an oblique angle if the writer hopes to have any chance at success.

Emily Dickinson always has something hiding up her sleeve.

In the first line, the one that seems the most overt, Dickinson plants a seedling of ambiguity.

Does it refer to all the truth, as in the whole truth, as we said before, or all the people, as in tell everyone the truth?

it opens up a crack in the poem that foreshadows things to come success.

In a poem about truth, the word lie sticks out like a sore thumb.

The sentence invites us to read it as reside or be found.

But as Professor Ashby Crowder points out, the speaker doesn't seem to realize that she actually says circuit lies too, the line, in effect, containing its own contradiction.

Circuit is an important image in Dickinson's work, often contrasted with circumference, where circuit means life as we know it and circumference is the outer limit of experience, the tenuous, often frightening boundary between what humanity, human beings, can understand, and

Dickinson has a deeply ambivalent relationship with circumference, at times expressing that it's safer to remain within one circuit, at other times proclaiming my business is circumference, as she once did in a letter here.

Amazingly, she manages to condense that ambivalence into just four words without losing any of its complexity.

The immediate thing you notice is that the sentence is flipped around so that the final word can be surprise.

The truth is a surprise, Dickinson says, one that is too bright for our delight, literally d light an emotion that is inherently weak and feeble.

She contends it's about now when things start to fall off the rails a little bit.

Because if truth is a surprise, a word that originally meant an attack without warning, a surprise too bright for us, how can anyone grab hold of it in the first place to repackage it in a slant or circuitous way?

The word surprise at the end of this phrase almost starts to feel ominous, like you've gone back into the poem only to find as lightning to the children eased with explanation, explanation kind.

Now that we're looking at this poem with some suspicion, it's easier to see the problems in the metaphor Dickinson picks to elucidate her earlier statements.

She equates telling slant truth to adults, easing children about lightning.

Except it's not the children who are eased here, according to this slightly confusing grief grammar.

Does an explanation, however kind, actually ease the force of lightning?

It strikes me that children equipped with feeble emotions, facing a surprise attack from something that's so bright it will blind them, have good reason to be scared.

All a kind explanation can do, as Professor Gary Lee Stoneham notes, is offer a comforting but preposterous fiction, a realization that's brought home in the phrase dazzle gradually, which sounds great with its assonance but is ultimately oxymoronic.

When something dazzles like lightning, it happens all at once.

Somewhere between the blindness of not ever being able to see the truth and the blindness of actually seeing it.

This, I think, is where Dickinson wanted to get us all along.

She essentially wrote a poem that subverts itself.

This is not direct like it appears to be.

She knew all too well that a kind explanation of her philosophy just wouldn't work.

That feeling of the text being destabilized from within, oscillating from meaning to the negation of that meaning.

That's Dickinson showing you the lightning.

That's Dickinson stepping out onto the circumference, glimpsing some truth in the unstable place where language fails.

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