I Stepped from Plank to Plank

I Stepped from Plank to Plank - meaning Summary

Uncertain Steps Toward Experience

The speaker describes moving cautiously across narrow planks with stars overhead and the sea below, aware that any step could be their last. That persistent awareness of danger produces a tentative, deliberate gait the poem calls experience. Dickinson suggests experience is less about accumulated skill than about living under constant uncertainty and the selfhood formed by recognizing mortality and risk.