Summary and analysis of E. Dickinson, “The Wind Tapped Like a Tired Man”
The poem is made up of five stanzas; each stanza is composed of four lines, mainly trimeters and tetrameters, but they are not regular from a metrical point of view. The rhyme scheme is interlocking (ABCB), with a few irregularities.
The wind tapped at the speaker’s door, and she let it inside her house. But it was a swift, bodiless guest, which was impossible to hold back. It was insubstantial and its sound was like the buzz of tiny birds from a bush. It looked like a cloud of smoke, and when it passed it created a sound similar to the music produced when blowing through a glass.
The wind visited her, but always on the move; then it tapped again, impetuously this time, and she was left alone.
Emily Dickinson often wrote poems based on the observation of simple natural phenomena, always giving an original, unusual perspective on reality. In this short, intense poem, she personifies the wind as a “tired man”, a “timid man” tapping at her door, maybe to indicate its gentleness, its breezy character. It is characterized by lack of substance, by haste and by the impossibility to stay over. The sound it produces is soft, like the humming of small birds, or like the music produced when you blow through glass. On the other hand, she connotes herself as a “host”, who “boldly” lets the guest in: she is kind, she behaves as a lady would do, and she is not afraid of the “stranger” knocking on her door. It seems she regrets its/his going away, at the end, since she returns to her usual feeling and situation of loneliness.
Is it only the wind she is speaking about? Or is she using the wind as an image to speak about something else?
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