Reading a Dickinson Poem in Four Moves

The idea

Dickinson's compression rewards a fixed procedure. Move one: find the situation, which is usually a single concrete scene stated in the first two lines, a carriage, a deathbed, a door, a gun. Move two: identify the abstraction the scene stands for, since she almost always pairs one concrete image with one large idea, and the poem's work is the pairing. Move three: locate the turn, which in her poems is often the final stanza and often reverses what the earlier stanzas implied, so a poem that has been calm becomes frightening or a poem about defeat becomes about knowledge. Move four: check the rhyme at the end, because a poem that closes on a slant rhyme is refusing the resolution its grammar seems to offer, and the exam's questions about tone are usually decided there.