I Started Early Took My Dog Summary

The poem #520 (I started Early – Took my Dog) is a complex work that demonstrates about Dickinson’s aggressively feminist poem and her thoughts about nature, culture, scandal and sexual identity.

The poem begins with the two-stanza statement, which announces the speaker’s visits to the sea followed by the sea’s reaction to her presence on the shore. The first two lines of the poem “I started Early – Took my Dog –/And visited the Sea –” declare the motive, goal and rationale for the “visit,” but this declaration does not appears (). The speaker provides a statement of enigmatic fact that she recalls the earliness of this venture with no specific point of departure, but the end of the poem, the “Solid Town” in the concluding stanza, doubles as a point of origin (). From the beginning the speaker does not give us any information concerning the nature of this “visit;” however, the reader could think about several scenarios that the speaker of this poem would take casual early-morning walk accompanied by her dog, an excursion of some ambiguous nature on which the dog might accompany her for protection, and also in an Emersonian vein, a latter day experiment with the nature (). The world “visit” here has two possible definitions (1) “an instance of going to a place, house, etc., for the purpose of inspection or examination” and the verb form (2) “to go to (a place) for the purpose of seeing that everything is in due order” (OED). The poem does not give any indication in its earliest stanza that the range of the term “visit” seems operative, but the more we analysis the poem’s textual boundaries, the more this reading of Dickinson’s “visit” reveals something about her poetic work.

When the speaker reaches the sea, she is associated...

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...a and her response to it at the beginning of the fifth stanza. The speaker being “followed” by the sea shows its hunt after her. Repeating the pronoun “He” alerts us to her continuing terror after she escapes the immediate site of the vulnerability. The sexualized motions of the sea follows the speaker’s that signal a transformation from the sexual aggressor to just a responsive partner from the sea’s part. When the speaker’s sexual urges and energies awakened or started, they outstrip those of the previous aggressive sea and exceed them in enjoinment. The repetition of “he” serves to discriminate the speaker’s state of arousal from the sea. When the speaker defines herself in terms “ankle” and “shoes,” she domesticates limits the irresistible sea with only these two phrases “his Silver Heel” and “ Pearl” because she restricts the sea to rise higher that her ankle.