A Lesson in Grammar: Dickinson's "Grasped by God" and "Drowning is not so pitiful"

Abstract

This essay argues that Dickinson's fragments deserve to be read in their own light and for their poetic qualities, not just as phrases later incorporated in poems or as aphorisms. Reading "Grasped by / God" (PF76, Fr1542A) with attention to its alliteration, spacing on the page, and interpretive ambiguities, I find greater richness in the phrase as it appears in fragment form than in the poem where it later appears, revised.