Emily Dickinson

I Tried to Think a Lonelier Thing

poem 532

I Tried to Think a Lonelier Thing - meaning Summary

Loneliness Imagined and Mirrored

The speaker deliberately imagines an even greater loneliness to test the limits of feeling and to locate another consciousness within thought. In reaching for an imagined counterpart she confronts a mutual isolation that both comforts and unsettles. The poem moves from intellectual probing to an almost tactile desire for connection, ending with a reversal in which sympathy suggests that each may pity the other, blurring self and imagined other.

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I tried to think a lonelier Thing Than any I had seen Some Polar Expiation An Omen in the Bone Of Death’s tremendous nearness I probed Retrieverless things My Duplicate to borrow A Haggard Comfort springs From the belief that Somewhere Within the Clutch of Thought There dwells one other Creature Of Heavenly Love forgot I plucked at our Partition As One should pry the Walls Between Himself and Horror’s Twin Within Opposing Cells I almost strove to clasp his Hand, Such Luxury it grew That as Myself could pity Him Perhaps he pitied me

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