Emily Dickinson's poetry is chock full of nature imagery, and this one is no different. Here, she uses images from the natural world to represent openness and possibility. She shows nature as something that is pure and holy. It's these kinds of ideas that cause some to lump her in with Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, even though not all of her poems go quite so far on the nature-is-holy tip. What's makes it all the more interesting is that "I dwell in Possibility—" also recognizes how hard it is for us to fully embrace nature. After all, we're just specks in the middle of it; it'd take one serious bear hug to embrace it all.
Questions About Man and the Natural World
- Why do you think the speaker compares the rooms of the house specifically to a forest of cedars?
- Why do you think the sky/roof is specifically described as having "Gambrels"?
- In what ways does the poem give nature an almost holy feel?
Chew on This
The poem sets up a contradiction between inside and outside that represents the way in which the contained structure of a poem can open us up to the uncontained infinity of the Universe.
The speaker in the poem views nature as the goodness of God.