Resource: I started Early-Took my Dog, by Emily Dickinson

Many poets and authors have written about going to sea—Whitman, Melville, Baudelaire, Rimbaud… a list that goes at least all the way back to Homer—for the sea lets the poet talk about adventure, escape, vastness, even the infinite depths of the self or the unconscious. In her poem about the sea, which talks about all of these things, Emily Dickinson uses the ballad form. Constructed in four-line stanzas with strong rhythms, repetitions, and rhymes (usually on the second and fourth lines), ballads have strong associations with oral poetry and storytelling.

In her first stanza—the first brief scene of her story—Dickinson's speaker transforms the sea into a house. As if paying a social call, she is greeted at the shore by mermaids and frigates (square-rigged ships of the 18th and early 19th centuries); the frigates hold out "Hempen Hands" (their sails and ropes) to her as though she were a shipwrecked "Mouse" that they could rescue. The sea seems a magical place, and the poem like a nursery rhyme, filled with friendly, unthreatening creatures with no other people in sight.

In the third stanza, however, the mood shifts. Just as the speaker notes that "no Man moved Me," the tide rises above her shoes, apron, belt, and bodice, becoming a "He," a man, who threatens to "eat me up." "And then—I started—too," the speaker says, repeating a crucial verb from the poem's first stanza. In the poem's first line it implies "starting a journey"; repeated here, you see the speaker more as someone "starting with fright."

The speaker who calmly "visited" the sea at the start of the poem now flees from it, with the sea (still a "He") running "close behind." Literally, we can picture her running from the incoming tide as the water laps at her feet; figuratively, the sea seems about to join with and consume her, its (or his) "Heel" touching her "Ankle." She pauses to imagine the two of them as one: "Then my Shoes/ Would overflow with Pearl," she muses, shifting from the past to a conditional tense and suggesting that, in her imagination, some bounty of beauty would result. The use of the pronoun "we" in the final stanza reiterates that they are indeed united for a moment, and, again, that the experience in this uncertain, fantastical world of the shore isn't entirely unpleasant. As the two reach the "Solid Town," though, they become separate selves. Our final sight of the sea is as a "bowing" gentleman whose "Mighty look/ At me" (a lower case "me" that contrasts with the capitalized "Me" in the third stanza), leaves her feeling a tangible sense of loss.

Read a biography of the poet Emily Dickinson at the Poetry Foundation.

• Chart how the speaker's views of the sea change over the course of the ballad. Find lines or gestures that illustrate how the sea views the speaker.
• In her poetry, Dickinson capitalizes many words and places many dashes. Can you find moments where this practice changes or adds to your understanding of the ballad?
• Examine the rhyming words in each stanza. What ideas do these rhymes pair together through their repetition of sound? What is the effect of Dickinson's rhyming words that "don't quite rhyme?"
• Look at some other poems about the sea:
  • "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," by Walt Whitman
  • "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • "The Triumph of Time," (beginning "I will go back to the great sweet mother / Mother and lover of men, the sea"), by Algernon Swinburne
  • "Sea Fever," by John Masefield
• How does their treatment of the sea differ from Dickinson's?