Our analysis of Stanza 1

Below we give our overall grammatical analysis for stanza 1. But before we do that, let's outline some of the 'tricky problems' in the first stanza:

• 'wider than the sky' It should be clear that this phrase is a complement in the structure of the Main Clause. It comes after a linking verb and has an adjective ('wider') as its headword. But there is a bit of a problem about how to construe the postmodifier which comes after the headword. Here we have called it a prepositional phrase on the grounds that 'than' in other constructions can be a preposition. But we could just as easily see the prepositional phrase as a reduced comparative clause ('the brain is wider than the sky is wide'). This is just one of those tricky little problems in English grammar and Dickinson doesn't seem to be making anything much out of the problem, so we won't spend any more time on it.

• The structure of the last 3 lines of the stanza is also a bit problematic. You could argue that 'put them side by side' is a Main Clause and has the force of an imperative- telling you what to do in order to see what then happens. But it is also possible to see 'put them side by side' as a reduced conditional clause (parent of an 'if . . . then' structure: 'if you put them side by side . . .', in which case it is an adverbial clause embedded inside another adverbial clause ('for . . . the one the other will contain). We have chosen this latter style of analysis below as the 'basic' form, on the grounds that the understood conditional 'if . . . then' structure appears to be the most important for the understanding of the overall sentence. The 'imperative' reading also has some effect, of course - namely to make the content of the poem feel more 'dramatic' - it is as if Emily Dickinson is standing right next to you, telling you what to do. In this case, then, the grammatical ambiguity which Dickinson has created is being used to good effect - it makes the conditional structure clear while at the same time making the poem feel more dramatic, personal and involving.

• In the tree diagram below we have not analysed the internal structure of 'side by side' as it appears to be one of those idiomatic expressions (like 'cats and dogs' in 'It's raining cats and dogs' which does not appear to be the sum of its apparent grammatical parts, but acts more or less as if it were a single word.

Here is our analysis of the first sentence/stanza:

Overall the stanza is one whole sentence with a rather complex Adverbial (an embedded adverbial clause with another adverbial clause embedded inside it. Is has the following overall structure.

Note how the odd relation between the brain and 'You' in the last stanza is foregrounded by its odd 'second object' connection to the predicator 'contain'. This is achieved by a deviant, and thus foregrounded grammatical construction, involving putting the first of the two coordinated noun phrase objects to 'put' before the predicator, and placing the other one after the predicator, and separated from it by 'with ease'.

Another way of providing the same overall information (and which uses less space but is less detailed and is probably not as clear) would be to use brackets and labels '[ ]' to show the main clause boundaries and '( )', the subordinate clause boundaries:

S	P	C
[The Brain	| is|	wider than the Sky -
(A- (A embedded inside first A) (For (- put them side by side -) -A)
The one the other will contain With ease - and You - beside)]

 

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Our analysis of Stanza 2

We won't bother to diagram out stanza 2 because its overall structure is roughly the same as stanza 1 - SPCA-(A)-A. Indeed, the first three lines of the stanza are identical structurally and only 5 words have been changed:

The Brain is Adjer than the N
For - P themN by/to N -
The one the other will P

Then, in the last line of the first stanza, we get an adverbial phrase, a second object and another adverbial completing the clause started in line 3 (or, more accurately, with the 'For' at the beginning of line 2). In the second stanza we also get an adverbial, but this time an adverbial clause with a rather unusual order 'As Sponges - Buckets do'. This structure, with the 'dummy verb' 'do' replacing 'absorb' and being moved to the end of the clause, juxtaposes 'sponges' and 'buckets' helping to increase the strikingness of the line which we talked about when discussing semantic relations in the poem.

The clear overarching grammatical parallelism between the two stanzas (and the repetition of 'brain' and most of the closed class (grammatical) words) results in an extended parallelism between the two stanzas, inviting us to see the content of the stanzas as equivalent. This reinforces the set of semantic parallels already mentioned when we looked at the semantic structure of the poem.

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Our analysis of Stanza 3

As with the semantic level analysis we have already completed, what we find here is that there is some degree of parallelism but the pattern set up in the first two stanzas is broken in various significant ways. The first two lines have the same grammatical structure except that, significantly, the comparative structure is replaced by an equative one (and one which is made very clear by the addition of the word 'just'). This equative structure, in turn, leads to more significant changes in the last two lines. The transitive structure involving the process of one thing being included in the other is replaced by an intransitive structure saying that they will differ in the way that syllable and sound differ (i.e. not much). Moreover, an extra conditional adverbial clause 'if they do' is included, which suggests that the difference just suggested may turn out not to exist anyway. So again the grammatical patterning reinforces what we have already seen at the semantic level.

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Next: Task D: Phonemic structure