Ms. Dickinson, Is That You?
The speaker of the poem doesn't tell us a lot about herself. But—and this is a big but—we can tell a lot about her general philosophy through this poem.
One thing we know for sure is that she's got mad respect for the human mind. How do we know this? Well, the point of the whole poem is how awesome the brain is, so it's kind of a given. By saying that our brains are "wider than the Sky" and "deeper than the Sea" the speaker is proudly declaring the power of the human intellect (1-5).
The speaker seems to think that the human brain is so awesome that it even rivals the power of God himself. She even goes so far as to say that they only differ "As Syllable from Sound" (3.12). We interpret this to mean that the speaker thinks of the human intellect as something that's shaped and refined, while God is something raw and unformed. Many religious conservatives in Dickinson's day and ours might have a problem with statements like this. Is the speaker challenging the notion that God is a conscious force? If so, then she's a gal with radically different opinions than a lot of folks in Dickinson's day.
Dickinson herself is known for being kind of a religious rebel, so we might just be on the right track with this analysis of her speaker. And who knows—maybe we can just come right out and say that ol' Em herself is the speaker. What do you think, Shmoopers?