Emily Dickinson Common Hymn Meter

Art is divine. In western culture, art has been used to represent and honor divinity. Christianity is no exception to this trend. From the middle ages onward, Christianity has used art to worship its god. Knowing this, it isn’t shocking that worshipers took prayer and integrated it with meter. This common hymn meter allowed even the least artistic of believers to bring a tune to their prayers. However, this religiously based meter would not stay exclusively godly. Raised under an ultra-religious father, Emily Dickinson used her knowledge of common hymn meter to write secularly. This juxtaposition gave strength to her writings while still limiting her to the strict meter. Even with these restrictions, her poems continue to be cherished in American
However, this form of prayer was not particularly proper with worshippers until Isaac Watts. (cite) With a natural talent for rhyme and meter, Watts introduced nearly 600 hymns to English speaking Christians. “Composed by alternating lines of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter,” these widely published hymns made artistic worship available not only to gifted poets but to every Christian. This accessibility allowed the hymns to move ceaselessly between English speaking Christians. With popularity turning to necessity, these poems would spread and find their way to inspiring Emily Dickinson.
Often compared with Walt Whitman, Dickinson’s restriction to common hymn meter could be a restriction too her work. By following strict meter, her work was limited to tradition. This limitation kept many of her poem short, with her longest only reaching twelve stanzas. (CITE) Other poets, like Whitman, broke away from this structure and, from there, were allowed to expand into realms of writing that were not accessible to writers. Dickinson’s commitment to form can lead to her work becoming repetitive and uninteresting to a genre that continued to be flooded with
Although contemporaries of each other, comparing Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson is almost unfair. Dickinson’s commitment to meter gave a familiarity to her audience. With Christianity existing as a such a force in Western society, a westerner would be hard pressed to not be familiar with common hymn meter, even if it’s just in passing. This familiarity allows readers an ability to access her writing in a way that Whitman’s works cannot. Her shorter stanza, and poems in general, do not make her poems any more or less than Whitman’s as well. Practicing a less-is-more structure of writing, Dickenson’s poems are also up to a wider range of interpretation, allowing each reader to interpret the poem with their individual life