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 –
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Summary · Background · Form and Structure · A House Made of Openings · Themes
Glossary · Related Poems
Summary
In three short stanzas the speaker compares poetry to a house — a finer house than the one prose lives in. Poetry’s house has more windows, better doors, rooms as tall as cedar trees, and the open sky for a roof. Into it come “the fairest” visitors, and the speaker’s whole occupation is to stand inside with her small hands spread as wide as they will go, gathering paradise. The poem never steps outside its metaphor: it is twelve lines about what kind of building poetry is, and what a person does for a living once she moves in.
Background
Dickinson copied “I dwell in Possibility” into one of her hand-sewn fascicles around 1862, during the years when she was writing most intensely. She published almost nothing while she lived, and this poem was no exception — it stayed in manuscript until 1929, when it appeared in Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by her niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi with Alfred Leete Hampson. (It is sometimes mistakenly dated to the 1891 Second Series; it was not among those poems.) Its opening line has since become one of the most quoted in American poetry, and the poem is now read as Dickinson’s plainest statement of what she thought poetry was for — an ars poetica, a poem about poems.
Form and Structure
Three quatrains in the common meter Dickinson took from hymn books — four-beat lines alternating with three-beat ones — though as usual she loosens it until it barely keeps time. The rhymes are mostly slant: “Prose” against “Doors,” “This” against “Paradise,” with the one full rhyme falling on “eye” and “Sky.” What really carries the poem is its punctuation. Nearly every line ends on a dash — an opening rather than a stop, a way out of the line instead of a wall at the end of it. The dashes are the windows and doors the poem is boasting about: each one lets the sentence pass through into the next room. Only two lines in the whole poem end without a dash, and they are worth noticing — “And for an everlasting Roof” and “The spreading wide my narrow Hands.” Both run straight on into the line beneath, and both are moments of reaching: the roof opening into the sky, the hands opening to gather paradise. The form holds everything still except the two gestures that expand.
A House Made of Openings
The whole poem rests on a single comparison — poetry is a house, prose a lesser one — and Dickinson builds it out feature by feature, from the windows down to the work done inside.
Poetry as the Fairer House
The first stanza sets the two houses side by side and measures the difference entirely in openings. Poetry is “A fairer House than Prose,” and the proof is architectural: “More numerous of Windows – / Superior – for Doors –.” Not bigger, not stronger — more open. What makes poetry the better dwelling is how many ways there are to look out of it and move through it. Windows are angles of seeing; doors are ways in and out, between one meaning and the next. Dickinson defines poetry not by what it holds but by how porous it is. Prose is a sound enough house; it simply has fewer windows.
Impregnable of Eye
Then a strange word lands in the middle of all this openness. The chambers are “as the Cedars” — tall, fragrant, long-lasting, the timber of temples — but they are “Impregnable of eye.” “Impregnable” is a fortress word; it means unable to be stormed or broken into. In a poem bragging about windows and doors, the inner rooms turn out to be the one thing the eye cannot get into. The openness and the guardedness are the same fact: poetry lets you see further than prose, but its deepest chambers can’t be entered by looking — only by the imagination that built them. Above those rooms the roof is the sky itself: “And for an everlasting Roof / The Gambrels of the Sky.” A gambrel is a barn roof, the homeliest shape in rural New England; Dickinson takes that local silhouette and stretches it until it covers the heavens. The house has no ceiling. It is roofed by everything.
Narrow Hands, Wide Paradise
The last stanza turns from the building to the life lived in it. The visitors are “the fairest,” and the speaker’s “Occupation” — her job, her calling — arrives in the final image: “The spreading wide my narrow Hands / To gather Paradise.” Everything in that picture is held in tension. The hands are “narrow” — physically slight, and, for a near-housebound woman with little public standing, a quiet admission of how small her reach was supposed to be. But the verb undoes the adjective: “spreading wide.” And the object is the largest one there is — “Paradise.” Note the choice of verb, too: she gathers it, she does not seize or build or earn it. The poet’s work, in Dickinson’s account, is receptive — to open the small hands as far as they go and collect what is already scattered through the world. The ambition could not be bigger; the gesture could not be humbler. The whole poem lives in that gap.
Themes
Beneath the conceit, the poem makes a few clear claims. The first is about openness: poetry’s value, for Dickinson, lies in how many ways it lets you in and out — it holds more than one truth at a time, in rooms you move between rather than a single argument you follow to its end. The second is about the imagination as a private, defended space: the chambers are “Impregnable of eye,” reachable by the mind but not by mere looking. The third is quietly radical. The house was the assigned territory of nineteenth-century women, the sphere of housekeeping and confinement. Dickinson takes that prescribed domain and rebuilds it into a structure roofed by the sky, where the occupation is not housework but gathering paradise. She keeps the house and throws off the ceiling.
Glossary
A few words carry more weight than they first appear to.
- Possibility: Capitalized and treated as a place — somewhere the speaker lives, the way a person might live in a particular town. The abstraction becomes a dwelling.
- Prose: More than just non-verse writing. For Dickinson, prose is the plainer, more literal, more closed-in mode of language — elsewhere she writes of being “shut up in Prose” as a child. Here it is the lesser house poetry is measured against.
- Cedars: Cedar wood — fragrant, prized, and slow to decay, the timber used for temples and palaces in the Bible. The chambers are as tall and enduring as cedar trees.
- Impregnable: Unable to be broken into or taken by force — a word normally used of fortresses. “Impregnable of eye” means the rooms cannot be entered, or seen all the way into, by sight alone.
- Gambrels: A gambrel is a barn-style roof with two slopes on each side, a common, homely shape in rural New England. “The Gambrels of the Sky” turns the whole sky into the roof of the house.
Related Poems
If Dickinson’s house of poetry draws you in, these make good company:
- They Shut Me Up in Prose by Emily Dickinson: Its mirror image — the same prose-versus-poetry divide, seen from inside the locked room rather than the open house.
- The Soul Selects Her Own Society by Emily Dickinson: Another Dickinson interior, but one that shuts its door — the closed counterpart to this poem’s house of open windows.
- Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant by Emily Dickinson: A second compact statement of her poetics, reaching truth by indirection the way this poem gathers paradise instead of seizing it.
- Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish: The twentieth century’s best-known poem about poems — it ends “A poem should not mean / But be” — worth setting beside Dickinson’s earlier, stranger house.
- Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Another poem that raises an impossible building — a pleasure-dome decreed out of nothing — as an image of the imagination at work.