Ideas on Dickinson #336

In section last night, my small group discussed a few ideas we found interesting in Dickinson's poem #336 which starts "Before I got my eye put out-." A first glance through revealed that the poem quickly defeats the standard ballad rhyme scheme of abab or abcb. The first stanza's second and fourth lines do not rhyme, but the last line of the first stanza and the first line of the second do, which seemed noteworthy. Nor do the second and fourth lines of the second stanza rhyme; but they end in words which align with those in the first stanza's second and fourth lines, at least through slant rhyme. It seems like the poem's lines should end in rhymes like these:

out
see
eyes
me

Today
Sky
Heart
way

and instead it rhymes like this:

out
see
eyes
way

Today
Sky
Heart
me

The effect is to blend the first and the second stanza together, both visually and aurally. The topic of these stanzas is sight, hearing and imagination, and this structure creates a complication of the normal impressions created by the ballad rhyme scheme.

Also, the third stanza has five lines instead of the normal four. The first line and the second line are almost identical:

The Meadows -mine -
The Mountains - mine -

It is as the poem is more concerned with the iteration of ideas, or perhaps images, than with lines, and since the first two lines of the third stanza contain almost the same image of possession, three more can fit in the same stanza. This feature of the stanza almost shadows over the fact that it too has an odd rhyme scheme. In fact, the only stanzas which fit the conventional ballad rhyme scheme are the fourth and the fifth stanzas. Rather than starting out by obeying convention, Dickinson has started out with a disruption of convention and then cleaned up her form as the poem closes - though it doesn't come all the way back into the fold, as it closes on a slant rhyme and a dash.