A Transport One Cannot Contain

A Transport One Cannot Contain - meaning Summary

Inner Joy Kept Private

This short Emily Dickinson poem wrestles with the tension between an intense inner joy and the impossibility or danger of fully expressing it. The speaker suggests that some transports of feeling must remain contained lest their revelation diminish or profane the experience. Dickinson contrasts private ecstasy with crude public representation, imagining sacred feeling reduced to a trivial spectacle—small currency and ‘‘ghosts in cages’’—and warns that making the interior visible would collapse the universe of meaning that gives the feeling its value. The poem favors guarded mystery over exhibition.