A Prison Gets to Be a Friend
poem 652
A Prison Gets to Be a Friend - meaning Summary
Confinement Becomes Familiar
Dickinson presents confinement as something that becomes familiar and almost companionable. The poem traces how repeated restriction reshapes perception: prisoners learn to be grateful for limited comforts, adapt to routines, and accept narrowness as normal. Hope slowly gives way to a quieter, passive contentment while memories of wider freedom recede into something dreamlike or heavenly. The tone is calm but unsettling; restraint is not only external but psychological, producing a changed sense of self for which escape feels increasingly impossible.
Read Complete AnalysesA Prison gets to be a friend Between its Ponderous face And Ours a Kinsmanship express And in its narrow Eyes We come to look with gratitude For the appointed Beam It deal us stated as our food And hungered for the same We learn to know the Planks That answer to Our feet So miserable a sound at first Nor ever now so sweet As plashing in the Pools When Memory was a Boy But a Demurer Circuit A Geometric Joy The Posture of the Key That interrupt the Day To Our Endeavor Not so real The Check of Liberty As this Phantasm Steel Whose features Day and Night Are present to us as Our Own And as escapeless quite The narrow Round the Stint The slow exchange of Hope For something passiver Content Too steep for lookinp up The Liberty we knew Avoided like a Dream Too wide for any Night but Heaven If That indeed redeem
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