Sometimes with the Heart

Sometimes with the Heart - meaning Summary

Degrees of Loving Presence

The poem sketches graded levels of love, moving from common feeling to increasingly rare depths. Dickinson contrasts emotional, spiritual, and forceful kinds of loving, then concludes that true love is scarce. The compressed, elliptical phrasing emphasizes scarcity and the difficulty of sustained, powerful affection. Read as a sober observation, the poem suggests that while many feel something, far fewer achieve enduring or overwhelming love.