What Shall I Do It Whimpers So - Analysis

A feeling that won’t be evicted

The poem’s central claim is that an inner emotion can behave like a living creature: persistent, noisy, and hard to exile, even when the speaker wants peace. Dickinson names the trouble This little Hound within the Heart, which makes the problem intimate and bodily, not abstract. The hound barks and starts All day and night, and the speaker’s frustration is clear in the blunt question What shall I do. This is not the language of calm self-understanding; it’s the language of someone being interrupted in her own mind.

The “hound” as a domesticated kind of anguish

Calling the feeling a little Hound is oddly tender: a hound is a companion animal, not a monster, and yet it is also trained to pursue and to bay. The poem holds both at once. The hound is inside the heart, but it acts like it’s in a house: it won’t go, it keeps up its whimpers, and it creates a constant domestic disturbance. That tension matters: the speaker seems to want to treat the emotion as manageable, like a pet that can be tied or untied, yet its noise suggests something more urgent than ordinary mood. It’s “small” and still tyrannical.

Asking to “send it” away—and doubting that it will take

The first stanza tries out a solution that sounds like confession or prayer: Would you untie it, and Would it stop whining if I sent it to Thee. The capitalized Thee points to a divine listener, but the speaker doesn’t sound certain that holiness solves anything. Even the proposed act of giving the feeling away is framed as a question, not a decision. The inner hound may be transferable, but the speaker suspects it is also loyal—to her suffering, to her attention—so it might keep “whining” no matter where it’s sent.

A turn toward polite anxiety: the feeling as social nuisance

Then the poem pivots. Instead of focusing on the speaker’s misery, it worries about bothering the addressee: It should not tease you. The hound is imagined not only inside a heart but near your chair, on the mat, even daring to climb your dizzy knee. That word dizzy sharpens the fear: the addressee seems delicate, elevated, or overwhelming to approach. The speaker’s emotion is now cast as an ill-mannered animal that might embarrass her in the presence of someone she reveres. The tension shifts from how do I endure this? to how do I keep my suffering from being intrusive?

Carlo as final authority—and the strange comfort of outsourcing the self

The ending is both comic and revealing: Tell Carlo and He’ll tell me! Carlo was a real dog in Dickinson’s life, and invoking him makes the whole spiritual drama suddenly domestic again. It’s as if the speaker trusts a dog’s judgment about a “hound” more than she trusts her own. The poem’s last move suggests a mind looking for permission and instruction from anywhere—God, a beloved human presence, even a household animal—because the speaker cannot quite claim authority over her own heart. That dependence is the poem’s ache: the inner hound is hers, but she keeps asking others to decide what to do with it.

A sharper question the poem won’t resolve

If the feeling is truly within the Heart, what does it mean to send it away—except to pretend it belongs to someone else? The speaker’s politeness about not “teasing” the addressee may be another way of protecting herself: if her anguish becomes merely a nuisance at your side, she doesn’t have to name what it is. The hound keeps whimpering, but the poem keeps translating that whimper into something almost manageable, almost pet-like, and that may be the most desperate kind of control.