Tis Opposites Entice - Analysis

Want as the engine of desire

The poem’s central claim is that absence sharpens longing: what we don’t have is what we most vividly praise, chase, and even sanctify. Dickinson begins with a blunt principle—’Tis Opposites entice—and then spends the poem proving it through a string of extreme examples. The tone is brisk, almost aphoristic, as if the speaker is laying down a law of human feeling: attraction does not arise from comfort but from the pressure of lack.

That pressure shows up immediately in the odd pairing Deformed Men and Grace. Grace here isn’t a polite social charm; it reads like a spiritual or aesthetic wholeness, something the body’s Deformed condition throws into relief. The poem isn’t mocking the deformed; it’s observing how deprivation becomes a lens that makes the opposite quality blaze brighter.

Heat, daylight, and the cruel clarity of not having

Dickinson’s strongest physical image is Bright fires for The Blanketless. Warmth is not neutral; it is the thing that rescues, the thing that announces itself to the skin that lacks covering. Similarly, The Lost Day’s face suggests that daylight becomes most legible as it disappears—like the last light in a winter window. Calling it a face makes loss intimate: the day is not a measure of hours but a presence that can be missed like a person.

These images carry a hard edge. They imply that appreciation is not a virtue we freely choose but something reality forces into us. The blanketless doesn’t calmly admire fire; the fire is bright because need makes it flare.

Injured states of mind: blind, captive, beggar

The second stanza intensifies the thought by moving from weather and time into social and bodily captivity. The Blind treat sight as Enough Estate—a whole inheritance compressed into one sense. The word Estate matters: it’s not merely a pleasure but property, a lasting wealth. This isn’t sentimentality; it’s an unsettling economics of perception, where the “rich” are simply those who can do what others cannot.

Then comes the poem’s most violent turn of image: The Captive strangles new. The phrase suggests that captivity doesn’t just make freedom desirable; it makes the captive attempt something extreme, perhaps choking down fresh air, perhaps strangling in a frantic effort to be remade. Even the line For deeming Beggars play carries a sting: the captive’s imagination of beggars as “playing” shows how easily suffering can be misread from a distance, and how the mind in confinement invents consolations or insults to survive. The poem’s tension here is sharp: deprivation clarifies value, but it also distorts judgment and can turn desperate.

The hinge: from general law to intimate address

The final stanza pivots from public types—blind, captive, beggar—to a private Thee. To lack enamor Thee is the hinge: the poem’s law of opposites becomes a theory of love. If absence makes fire bright, then lack makes the beloved luminous. The grammar is compressed, but the emotional logic is clear: the speaker’s longing is not an accident; it is the very mechanism by which Thee becomes irresistible.

Divinity reduced to a single self

The poem ends with a daring contradiction: Tho’ the Divinity / Be only / Me. “Divinity” sounds like the beloved is godlike, yet the speaker abruptly collapses that grandeur into the smallest possible unit: one person, one pronoun. The line can read as humility—my worship is only my own, not a universal truth—or as audacity—the god I chase is nothing outside my own self. Either way, Dickinson keeps the poem’s main tension alive: the beloved is both transcendent (Divinity) and radically local (Me), and the force that makes that beloved feel divine is precisely lack.

A sharper question the poem leaves open

If opposites entice, is love in this poem actually a form of hunger that needs its own starvation? The speaker seems to suggest that closeness might dim what distance makes bright, that the very fulfillment of desire could erase the intensity that named it in the first place. In that sense, the poem’s final Me is not just an ending but a trap: desire circles back to the desirer, feeding on what it cannot fully possess.