I dwell in Possibility —
A fairer House than Prose —
More numerous of Windows —
Superior — for Doors —
Of Chambers as the Cedars —
Impregnable of Eye —
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky —
Of Visitors — the fairest —
For Occupation — This —
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise —
Composed c. 1862; first published posthumously in 1891. Public domain.
Analysis
“I dwell in Possibility” is Emily Dickinson’s compact ars poetica. In twelve lines, she advances a vision of poetry as a capacious dwelling whose architecture exceeds the limitations of discursive prose. Rather than denigrate prose as such, she contrasts modes of knowing: prose tends toward declarative statement and linear argument, while poetry offers multiplicity, permeability, and depth. The trope is domestic, but the scale is cosmic. The speaker inhabits a “House” whose features are metaphors for access and insight — “more numerous of Windows,” “Superior — for Doors.” The extra windows admit more light (interpretive angles); the superior doors invite ingress and egress (movement between meanings). Dickinson’s characteristic em dashes suspend syntax, turning each phrase into a threshold that opens onto further rooms of sense.
The opening declaration, “I dwell in Possibility,” frames poetry not as a pastime or profession but as a mode of being. To “dwell” suggests sustained habitation and ethical orientation. Possibility is thus a place and a practice. The comparative claim that follows — “A fairer House than Prose” — emphasizes not antagonism but difference of affordances. Prose, in this rendering, is a solid house with fewer apertures; poetry is more porous, more lit, more traversable. “Fairer” encodes aesthetic pleasure and moral rightness, as in Shakespearean usage; the poem proposes that beauty and goodness correspond when language is most open to the more‑than‑literal.
In the second stanza, the metaphor deepens from exterior features to interior structure. “Chambers as the Cedars” fuses botany and architecture, comparing rooms to trees whose height and longevity symbolize poetic amplitude and endurance. “Impregnable of Eye” hints at the paradox of poetry’s intimacy and reserve: the chambers welcome the visitor, yet no gaze can exhaust them. The “everlasting Roof” of “The Gambrels of the Sky” extends the house into the natural world; Dickinson’s very New England image of a gambrel roof (a barnlike silhouette) expands until it merges with the heavens. Poetry’s roof is the sky itself — an image that domesticates the sublime and sublimates the domestic.
The final stanza brings community and vocation to the fore. “Visitors — the fairest” may denote readers, muses, friends, or allegorical figures of Beauty and Truth that haunt Dickinson’s oeuvre. The speaker’s “Occupation” — “The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise —” — is at once humble and exalted. The adjective “narrow” registers physical slightness and social constraint; the verb phrase “spreading wide” enacts a counter‑gesture of expansion. “To gather Paradise” is not to seize heaven by force but to receive and arrange its scatterings — a curatorial art. Poetry collects the paradisal in the everyday and presents it to the fairest visitors.
Structure and Sound
The poem adopts Dickinson’s hymn‑derived idiom while refusing strict regularity. The quatrains approximate common meter (alternating iambic tetrameter and trimeter), but dashes, syntactic ellipses, and nominal phrasing fracture the cadence. Those apertures are integral to the thesis: the form models “Possibility,” letting silence, breath, and pause do semantic work. Capitals (House, Prose, Windows, Doors, Chambers, Cedars, Roof, Sky, Visitors, Occupation, Paradise) personify the poem’s elements into a small cosmos of proper nouns — a technique that both dignifies and abstracts the concrete, as if each architectural feature were a Platonic form.
Soundwork quietly guides interpretation. Initial alliterations (“House… Prose,” “Windows… Superior”) and liquid consonants lend buoyancy, while long vowels in “Prose,” “Doors,” and “Roof” stabilize the airy conceit. The phrase “Impregnable of Eye” is deliberately resistant: metrically dense, semantically defensive, it momentarily slows the reader’s advance, dramatizing the limit of perception within a poem ostensibly about openness. Meanwhile, the cadence of “The Gambrels of the Sky” lifts on “Gambrels” and floats on “Sky,” performing what it names. As often in Dickinson, diction and rhythm collaborate to enact meaning.
Visually, the stanzaic minimalism belies the scale of the metaphor. Windows proliferate beyond count; doors are “Superior” not only in number but in quality of passage. “Chambers” suggests both rooms and the chambers of the heart; “Cedars” invokes biblical timbering and temple building. The gambrel roof — a local, rural image — becomes an axis of transcendence. This is Dickinson’s signature maneuver: to scale the infinite from the proximate, to stage metaphysical insight inside the familiar angles of New England architecture.
Themes and Interpretation
Three claims anchor the poem’s thought. First, poetry is an epistemology of openness. The House of Possibility holds multiple, even contradictory truths in adjacent rooms; reading becomes a movement across thresholds rather than a march toward a single thesis. Second, poetry is an ethic of hospitality. By emphasizing “Visitors” and “Occupation,” Dickinson shifts attention from the solitary genius to the social work of welcoming meanings and people into shared space. Hospitality is both method and morality: the poet’s labor is to keep doors open and windows numerous, to curate light.
Third, poetry models a disciplined receptivity that yields glimpses of “Paradise.” This “Paradise” is not deferred eschatology but an immanent experience of heightened perception — the felt abundance when language and attention align. The poem’s humility is essential here: the hands are “narrow,” and the act is “gather,” not conquer. Against triumphalist poetics, Dickinson proposes a quiet, capacious art that gathers rather than dominates. In the context of 19th‑century gender norms, the domestic metaphor is radical: it appropriates the assigned feminine sphere (housekeeping) and converts it into a figure of intellectual and spiritual sovereignty. The poet is house‑builder and house‑keeper of infinity.
Ultimately, “I dwell in Possibility” declares that poetry’s value lies in its architecture of access — more views (Windows), more thresholds (Doors), loftier rooms (Chambers as the Cedars), and a roof that is indistinguishable from the heavens. The closing gesture — hands spread to gather — is both benediction and blueprint for the reader: make space, let light in, and treat language as a dwelling capacious enough to welcome the world.