"Shall I take thee, the Poet said"

Shall I take thee, the Poet said

To the propounded word?

Be stationed with the Candidates

Till I have finer tried - 

The poet searched Philology 

And was about to ring

For the suspended Candidate

There came unsummoned in - 

That portion of the Vision 

The word applied to fill

Not unto nomination

The Cherubim reveal - 

Fr 1243

This poem is “meta”, it is a poem about the process of writing a poem. The speaker opens with the poet addressing the word choices, pondering their worthiness within the form. There is tension throughout the poem, as the poet works to find language that perfectly communicates her vision, initially without success. The speaker applies worldy, political terms to the words she considers for use. She refers to them as “candidates” and “propounded”. Her word choices seem stately in nature, ready to be chosen because of their merit in communicating the thoughts of the poem. The poet is having trouble finding that “perfect” word. I can almost visualize a poet poring over a list of possible word choices, trying desperately to study them in order for one to come out clearly above the rest. Just when the poet is about to choose a word she had previously dismissed, inspiration strikes. 

The last five lines of the poem take a turn, signifying the role of the muse in communicating inspiration when simple human effort did not. The word has revealed by “cherubim”, a term starkly different than words like “candidates”, “philology” and “propounded”. Her use of the word cherubim implies that there is a divinity at work in poetry which helps the poet bridge the gap of communication through inspiration. The way that Dickinson describes this muse is important. It is not a muse that is simply called upon, the muse enters the room of the poet “unsummoned”. The words of the muse are not chosen by nomination, like they were in the opening of the poem. They are not chosen at all, they are “revealed”. 

This poem is even more interesting when you think about Dickinson’s own process of writing poetry. She clearly was very careful in her word choices when writing, oftentimes including alternate that she considered in the margins of her work. She took the process of writing poetry seriously, like the poet that the speaker describes. Every word was examined for all of its meanings and implications. The essay “Emily Dickinson’s Poetic Vocabulary” offers an insightful and informative array of information involving Dickinson’s vocabulary and word choice in her poetry, as well as comparisons to other famous poets. For example, Dickinson’s concordance was compared with three other poets: Keats, Emerson, and Lanier. The study found that there were 2,333 words in the Dickinson concordance that were not found in any of the other three (Howard 229). Dickinson’s vocabulary is often unusual, even compared to other poets. “Shall I take thee, the Poet said” describes the way in which the material and the immaterial come together in poetry, in order to perfectly communicate the vision of the poem. While divine intervention was important in the process, it was not necessarily more important than the groundwork that was laid by the poet in her laboring over language. One beget the other, the cherubim, or muse, enters like a breakthrough, only made possible through the physical process of writing.  

Howard, William. “Emily Dickinson's Poetic Vocabulary.” PMLA, vol. 72, no. 1, 1957, pp. 225–248. 

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/460227.