How Did Emily Dickinson's Use Of Hymn-Meter

It can be that said Emily Dickinson was the American Pioneer of ‘Hymn Meter’, and because of her use of it, all of her poetry flows to a specific and natural rhythm. It has not been uncommon for poets to attach themselves to a specific style and structure of writing. For instance, the Shakespearean sonnet is named after Shakespeare, not because he invented it, but because he wrote in that form so often. He popularized the style, and so it is attached to his name. While Dickenson never quite reached that point in her career, her use of hymn-meter in the various forms of her poetry helped create an underlying complexity in her writing that often goes unnoticed. A ‘hymn’ is typically a religious song or poem, and its meter measures the number of syllables per line in a single stanza. There are several variations of meter that a hymn can be written in, and Dickinson used a great number of them to vary her poetry, such as common, long, and short particular meter. By varying which forms of Hymn-Meter she used, Dickinson was able to both give her

By sticking to the form of her chosen meter and not the topic, she made her work stand out as unique and interesting. One of her poems in example, often referred to as “I’m Nobody, Who are you?”, is about the publicizing and conforming of one’s self. It contains two quatrains and uses a combination of iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. In contrast, another one of her poems, “Wild Nights”, seems to mostly use iambic dimeter, and makes use of a rhyme scheme. Despite the fact that both of these poems are written in loose hymn form, Dickinson used the meter variations available to give them each a different rhythm. Had she not made use of this, the tone of both poems might have been similar even with their vastly different