2005. A Cognitive Rhetoric Of Poetry And Emily Dickinson.

A cognitive rhetoric of poetry and Emily Dickinson
Craig Hamilton, University of California at Irvine, USA
Abstract
In this article, I examine three poems by Emily Dickinson. The poems are F372, ‘After
great pain, a formal feeling comes’, F598, ‘The Brain – is wider than the Sky’, and
F1381, ‘The Heart is the Capital of the Mind,’ from the Franklin edition. In particular,
I study the figurative language in these poems, but rather than simply identify figures, I
attempt to explain how they function persuasively in cognitive terms. This approach is
meant to move rhetorical criticism beyond an exercise in figure identification and
towards an exercise in the explanation of the persuasive function of figures. The
emphasis on figures owes something to the prominence they play not only in
Dickinson’s poetry but in all poetry. One implication of cognitive linguistic theories of
figures is that they point towards what I envisage as a cognitive rhetoric of poetry. A
cognitive rhetoric of poetry ought to be grounded in classical theories of rhetoric and
poetics on the one hand, and in cognitive linguistic theories of figures on the other.
Such scope would reveal continuity between the concerns of current critics and the
concerns of classical rhetoricians. It would also place equal emphasis on the poet’s
production of figurative language and the reader’s comprehensive processing of it.
What Dickinson’s poems are meant to reveal, ultimately, is poetry’s profoundly
rhetorical nature.
Keywords: analogies; blends; cognitive rhetoric; Dickinson, Emily; figures; similes
1 Introduction
Although this special issue of Language and Literature may imply that criticism
can move ‘beyond rhetoric’, that may be misleading, for critical and literary texts
are themselves rhetorical. For example, while Phelan has recently discussed the
importance of ‘approaching narrative as rhetoric’ (2004: 341; my italics), Lodge
states in his preface to The Art of Fiction: ‘An alternative title for this book, if
Wayne Booth hadn’t used it already, would be The Rhetoric of Fiction’ (1993: x).
To explain why, Lodge admits he ‘always regarded fiction as an essentially
rhetorical art’ (1993: x; my italics). The fact that The Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth,
1961) remains well known over four decades after its publication suggests that it
is invaluable to think of literature as rhetoric. And yet, if it is invaluable, then
why hasn’t someone followed in Booth’s footsteps by writing The Rhetoric of
Poetry? Some may counter that Aristotle already wrote The Rhetoric of Poetry
when he wrote his Poetics, yet Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the Poetics are often
reprinted today as two distinct and apparently unrelated texts. This might be a
signal to students that rhetoric and poetics should be kept apart, or that ‘the
contrast’ of poetics to rhetoric (Altieri, 2004: 473) cannot be escaped.
ARTICLE
Language and Literature Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), Vol 14(3): 279–294
DOI: 10.1177/0963947005054482 http://lal.sagepub.com

Unfortunately, separating rhetoric from poetics ignores the fact that ‘from Plato
to Paul de Man, rhetoric and poetics have been intertwined’ (Preminger, 1986:
230) and the fact that ‘the two arts remain all but inextricable’ (Brogan, 1994:
257) given rhetoric’s ‘well nigh inseparable link with poetics’ (Verdonk, 1999:
294).
Isolating rhetoric from poetics makes about as much sense as isolating
literature from rhetoric. After all, literature is a form of rhetoric, as the term
‘argument’ (Cuddon, 1991: 60) implies. Literary critics often use argument, for
example, to refer to what a poem would persuade us to imagine, think, or
believe. In doing so, the assumption that literature is rhetoric becomes explicit
rather than implicit. If literature is rhetoric, and if figurative language is the
rhetoric of poetry, then a rhetoric grounded in cognitive linguistic theories of
figurative language might be termed a cognitive rhetoric of poetry. While the
connections between rhetoric and cognition motivated scholars like Sperber
(1975) to coin the term ‘cognitive rhetoric’, the term is perhaps more widely
understood as the research program Turner proposed in his book, Reading Minds
(1991). From there, ‘cognitive rhetoric’ found its way into handbooks, such as
the seventh edition of the Glossary of Literary Terms (Abrams, 1999: 269), but
this does not mean the term is clearly understood. While a phrase like ‘cognitive
rhetoricians’ (Carroll, 1999: 159; Turner, 2002: 9) might suggest a large group of
scholars are working overtly within this area, not everyone appreciates the term.
Stockwell, for instance, calls cognitive rhetoric an ‘ugly’ and ‘repulsive’ term yet
simultaneously admits that terms like ‘cognitive hermeneutics’ or ‘cognitive
rhetoric’ may be ‘more right’ as an ‘alternative’ to ‘cognitive poetics’ or
‘cognitive stylistics’ (Stockwell, 2004). For his part, Hall (2003: 353) refers to
‘cognitive poetics / stylistics / rhetoric’ in a way that suggests these terms might
simply be interchangeable. To be clear, Sperber saw cognitive rhetoric as a first
step towards the development of what would become known as Relevance
Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986) in pragmatics. But Turner, whose definition I
adhere to here, took cognitive rhetoric to refer to ‘case studies explaining
individual works and elucidating in the process three levels on which cognitive
studies form the ground of criticism’ (Turner, 1991: 239). Those levels were the
level of ‘local phrasing’, the level of the ‘whole literary work’, and ‘the level at
which we conceive of literature generally’ (1991: 240–5).
In this sense, cognitive rhetoric can be useful to examine figures and texts in
particular, and literature in general. That is why, if critics think of literature as
rhetoric, cognitive rhetoric can be thought of as a means of studying literature,
which classical rhetoricians classified as epideictic rhetoric. Culler, for his part,
would probably agree with Turner’s proposals because, as Culler has stated,
‘Poetry is related to rhetoric: it is language that makes abundant use of figures of
speech and language that aims to be powerfully persuasive’ (1997: 71). Culler
refrains from saying ‘poetry is rhetoric’, but he nevertheless defines poetry in
terms of rhetoric, figurative language, and persuasion. Therefore, it seems fitting
to study the rhetoric of poetry by studying first and foremost the persuasive and
Language and Literature 2005 14(3)
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figurative language of poetry, especially since early modern rhetorical
stylisticians rarely ‘decoupled’ figures ‘from persuasive language’ (Fahnestock,
2005). Today, thanks to the rise of cognitive linguistics, a rhetoric of poetry can
thus be thought of as a cognitive rhetoric of poetry, especially if we agree that
‘Meanings are [. . .] in people’s minds, not in words on the page’ (Lakoff and
Turner, 1989: 109).
As Auden famously put it in The Sea and the Mirror, ‘Everything, in short,
suggests Mind’. Granted, it might seem tautological to claim that the study of
literature, language, poetics, rhetoric, and stylistics is really the study of the mind
for it then becomes difficult to say what the study of the mind is not. While this
article is not the place to take up that question, I simply want to suggest that
cognitive rhetoric is an apt label for examining those mental processes for the
achievement of meaning that are better known as analogy, simile, and metaphor.
As Collins (1991) argued, it is impossible to do poetics without doing
hermeneutics because the generalizations of poetics can only be made through
references to specific texts. The same is true of cognitive rhetoric, which is why,
for the remainder of this article, I want to focus on simile, metaphor and analogy
in three poems by Dickinson – F372, F598 and F1381, as numbered in the
Franklin edition (Dickinson, 1999).
As to why my article is limited to Dickinson, I can offer three explanations.
First, as Stonum, a Dickinson scholar, has written, ‘It is a common claim in
contemporary criticism that figurality is crucial to literary language and that it is
also the feature which most fully resists codification and certainty’ (1990: 51).
Although I agree that ‘figurality is crucial to literary language’, I hope to
demonstrate in this article that figures do not always resist critical codification
because arriving at a sound understanding of the way they work is possible
within that discursive genre known as literary criticism. Second, in writing about
Dickinson, Anderson states: ‘Poetic language in mid-nineteenth century America
had been reduced to a relatively flat and nerveless state, but he furnished her
[Dickinson] with the clues for its [poetic language’s] resurrection’ (Anderson,
1963: 145). If Anderson is right, then literary history testifies to the importance
of Dickinson’s wonderful language and the value of studying it closely. Third,
because ‘Dickinson’s poems are brief’ (West, 1993: 31) many stylistic devices,
including ‘compression and ellipsis’ (Richmond, 1989: 41) and deletions of
nouns and verbs (Ross, 2004), are used in a sophisticated manner within that
rather small space known as a Dickinson lyric poem. This may be why some
refer to Dickinson’s work as ‘iridescent, puzzling, explosive’ (Tursi, 1998), an
opinion that makes it all the more fitting to turn to Dickinson’s poems for a
discussion of the rhetorical function of poetic figures. To summarize, my choice
of Dickinson is justifiable because ‘metaphor assumes vital meaning’ in her
poems (Richmond, 1989: 37) and because her metaphors ‘jar one into an
original, lively experience with [. . .] words, ideas, and situations’ (Richmond,
1989: 39).
A COGNITIVE RHETORIC OF POETRY 281

2 The Poems1
Poem F372 (Dickinson, 1999: 170)
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore’,
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –
The Brain is deeper than the sea –
For – hold them – Blue to Blue –
The one the other will absorb –
As Sponges – Buckets – do –
The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound –
The Heart is the Capital of the Mind
The Mind is a single State –
The Heart and the Mind together make
A single Continent –
One – is the Population –
Numerous enough –
This ecstatic Nation
Seek – it is Yourself.2
282 CRAIG HAMILTON

3 ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’ (Poem F372)
My interest in Dickinson’s figurative language stems in part from my
dissatisfaction with the way some scholars discuss her use of it. For example,
Richmond finds that metaphor for Dickinson ‘does not merely compare two
objects of the real world, as in the traditional poetic performance of Milton or
Dryden or Keats; rather, the metaphor articulates the feelings she has experienced
in pure perception’ (1989: 34). Richmond assumes that Dickinson’s metaphors
are so unique that they have little in common with the metaphors of other great
poets, especially since they are rooted in ‘pure perception’. While I do not know
what ‘pure perception’ is, a cognitive linguist familiar with conceptual metaphor
theory could probably find that the metaphors of Milton, Dryden, Keats, and
Dickinson have more in common than someone like Richmond thinks. To be fair,
Richmond is insightful when he says that Dickinson’s metaphors ‘constitute the
reality of a poem by being the poem, rather than embellished comparisons that
are interpolated into the poem’ (Richmond, 1989: 35), and this insight seems an
appropriate place to begin.
Eminent Dickinson critics like Cameron spread confusion where clarity is
called for in discussing Dickinson’s use of figurative language. For example, in
reference to ‘Longing is like the Seed / That wrestles in the Ground’ (F1298),
Cameron writes:
Similes recognize that we fail at direct names because we fail at perfect
comprehension, and that certain experiences evade mastery and hence
definition – the best we can do is approximate or approach them; a simile is
an acknowledgment of that failure and contains within it the pain of imperfect
rendering. (1979: 35)
Here Cameron argues that metaphors are more direct than similes and,
conversely, that similes are less direct than metaphors. Cameron would thus say
that ‘Longing is like the Seed’ is less direct than ‘Longing is the Seed’. That is
fine as far as it goes, but Cameron’s account of why similes seem less direct than
metaphors does not go very far. To suggest somehow that similes are signs of
‘imperfect’ ‘comprehension’, or of a ‘failure’ in comprehension, is to mystify
similes unnecessarily, devalue the use of figurative language, and underestimate
the mind’s methods of meaning-making. Cameron’s account also fails to consider
in depth why similes and metaphors seem different in their directness. As poem
F372 reveals, similes are a means of comprehension rather than signs of a failure
to comprehend. Dickinson’s similes also point to the rhetorical nature of the
poem. Dickinson probably persuades most of her readers to believe that grief is a
devastating emotion. Pathos results from that argument, but the logos of that
argument is rooted in a comparison: to feel grief in mourning the death of some-
one else is similar to the pain one would feel in freezing to death oneself.
To see exactly how that argument is constructed and conveyed, however, the

poem’s figurative language needs to be discussed in depth. There are at least four
things readers might notice when re-reading the poem. First, there are
Dickinson’s metaphors. Throughout the poem Dickinson personifies various parts
of the body. She tells us ‘The Nerves sit’, the ‘Heart questions’, and the ‘Feet
[. . .] go round’. Body parts that sit, question, and walk seem to do on their own
what an entire individual could do. Dickinson’s choice to focus on the parts
rather than on the whole helps readers assign agency to the body parts rather than
to the person as a whole. The result is a representation of a passive persona to
whom things happen rather than an active persona who makes things happen.
Also, the ‘formal feeling comes’ to the persona as if of its own volition, and this
too personifies an emotion whose cause is apparently not to be located within the
persona here. As Dickinson scholars have noted, in a poem allegedly about ‘the
mind’s self-protective abandonment of consciousness’ (Eberwein, 1985: 141), the
‘formal feeling’ indicates ‘an abdication of presence’ (Cameron, 1979: 168). This
is similar to what Freeman, another Dickinson scholar, has discovered in
Dickinson’s poems in general: they often suggest a ‘sense of absence’ while a
‘semantics of silence’ is implied by her ubiquitous use of dashes (Freeman, 1996:
203).
Second, there are Dickinson’s similes. Her first simile, ‘The Nerves sit
ceremonious, like Tombs’, evokes a stillness of the nerves that owes little to an
actual lack of empathy on the part of the persona. Her second simile, ‘A Quartz
contentment, like a stone –’, seems strained to Cameron (1979: 15), apparently
because ‘quartz is a stone’. However, the simile’s target is not ‘Quartz’ but
‘contentment’. While ‘Quartz’ belongs to the category of stones, here it functions
as an adjective modifying an emotion, ‘contentment’. One reason why ‘Quartz’
can be used to depict ‘contentment’ is that emotions and stones do not belong to
the same conceptual categories (more on this simile later). Finally, the third
simile compares the persona’s future remembrance of this specific feeling of
grief to the sequential recollection that ‘Freezing persons’ may have of ‘the
Snow’: ‘First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –’. One way to para-
phrase this last simile is as follows: ‘This experience of grief is like death by
freezing: there is the chill, then the stupor as the body becomes numbed, and the
last state in which the body finally gives up the fight against the cold, and relaxes
and dies’ (Brooks and Warren, 1972 [1938]: 71). Another way to interpret what
occurs here is to say that the poem’s ‘concluding simile departs from the present
as if in analogy there were some further, final escape’ (Cameron, 1979: 168).
Rhetoric textbooks often define simile as an explicit comparison and metaphor
as an implicit comparison (Lanham, 1991: 140), and Dickinson explicitly
compares how the persona experiences grief to how the victims of death by
freezing feel. But if the presence of the last simile of the poem signifies ‘some
further, final escape’, then what Cameron has done is take the simile as
signifying something implicit rather than something explicit. Understanding the
simile, and interpreting it as a referring to something else (‘final escape’), are
two distinct processes. To be fair to Cameron, some of the confusion over similes
284 CRAIG HAMILTON

can be traced back to Aristotle, who called similes ‘metaphors, differing in the
form of expression’ (Aristotle, 1991: 229). Intuitively, metaphors (A is B) seem
stronger than similes (A is like B) in that they imply more rigid categorizations
(Glucksberg and McGlone, 1999). Furthermore, as Glucksberg and Keysar argue
(1993: 406), ‘Similes can always be intensified by putting them in metaphor
form, whereas the reverse does not hold’. That may be why we feel a difference
between ‘nerves are tombs sitting ceremoniously’ and ‘nerves sit ceremoniously
like tombs’. But according to Israel et al. (2003: 3) there is another way to
explain such differences: ‘A simile is a figurative comparison that reflects
similarities between conventionally unrelated items or domains rather than
creating similarities, which is what metaphor can do.’ If true, then the similes
‘like Tombs’, ‘like a stone’, and ‘As Freezing persons’ evoke concrete source
domains that ‘reflect similarities’ with more abstract target domains. Now, if
people had to know everything about the visual system’s working in order to see,
then only the neuroscientists of vision would be able to see. Readers do not need
to know how similes work in order to understand them, but critics might want to
think about how similes work before interpreting them and then claiming what
they mean. Therefore, while it is possible to interpret (as Cameron does) the
presence and use of the last simile in Dickinson’s poem as representing ‘some
further, final escape’, it is important to see that comprehending the simile and
making this claim are two different processes, and that taking the former process
for granted may have consequences for the latter.
Third, it can be argued that the words ‘formal’, ‘ceremonious’, ‘Tombs’, ‘He’,
and ‘stone’ reveal the presence of a funeral schema. My claim that grief is the
emotion Dickinson portrays is based on prototypically associating grief with
funerals. A refusal to demonstrate grief at a funeral is taken as a sign of abnormal
behavior (Mersault’s behavior at his mother’s funeral in Camus’ The Stranger is
but one literary example of this kind of behavior). With that in mind, the question
raised by Brooks and Warren (1972 [1938]: 71) – ‘why does the poet use
“quartz”’? – can be answered directly. Psycholinguistic research has shown that
subjects tend to prefer concrete rather than abstract source domains when
processing figurative language (Shen, 1997: 45).3 Comparisons based on abstract
source concepts tend to be ‘anomalous’ or ‘difficult to understand’ (Shen, 1997:
45). Dickinson refers to heavy, concrete, and hard objects in order to convey
grief to us, and this is what helps make the figures comprehensible. For example,
if the opposite of Quartz contentment is feather contentment, then it is easy to
see what sort of ‘contentment’ ‘Quartz contentment’ is. In addition, DIFFICULT IS
HEAVY and DIFFICULTIES ARE BURDENS (Grady, 1999: 80, 96) are two closely
related metaphors that explain the motivations behind Dickinson’s choice. As
Grady (1999: 96) has found, ‘weight and difficulty are two concepts linked’ in
many different languages via the DIFFICULT IS HEAVY and DIFFICULTIES ARE
BURDENS metaphors. To say that something is difficult, we may therefore say that
it is heavy (e.g. ‘I have a heavy task ahead of me this weekend’). Tombs, stones,
quartz, and lead are heavy; when coupled with an emotion, they suggest a

difficult emotion that is a heavy emotion. Of course, Dickinson does not
explicitly say ‘Grief is a very difficult emotion to experience and an almost
impossible emotion to bear’, but that is one way to summarize her argument and
explain her choice of words like ‘Quartz’.
Fourth, Dickinson’s last stanza evokes two basic metaphors: DEATH IS WINTER
and LIFE IS A PRECIOUS POSSESSION (Lakoff and Turner, 1989: 18, 30). If life is
warmth and death is cold, then Dickinson’s choice of words like ‘Freezing’,
‘Snow’, and ‘Chill’ are associated with the domain of death. Also, if life is
something that we may hang on to, cling to, or let go of, then ‘letting go’ in the
poem’s last line metaphorically refers to dying. Granted, this may seem obvious,
but it is worth realizing what general conceptual metaphors Dickinson relies on
specifically in order to make her point. To comprehend what her argument is and
how that argument works, it is thus useful to see how her specific linguistic
metaphors relate to more general conceptual metaphors. Clearly, Dickinson’s
metaphors reveal that she fully understands a concept such as PASSIONATE IS HOT;
DISPASSIONATE IS COLD (Lakoff and Turner, 1989: 190). To call someone ‘hot’ or
‘cold’ is to say very different things about them, and Dickinson understood that.
For example, in a letter to her sister-in-law, Susan Huntington Dickinson, the
poet once wrote: ‘my heart beats so fast [. . .] my darling, so near I seem to you,
that I disdain this pen, and wait for a warmer language’ (quoted in Koski, 1996:
29). To interpret ‘warmer’ as synonymous with ‘less affectionate’ in that last
sentence is to fundamentally misunderstand Dickinson’s words. However, the
widespread (albeit unconscious) knowledge that many people have of PASSION IS
HOT; DISPASSIONATE IS COLD helps limit such misunderstandings.
The four things I have just discussed are not all that can be said about this
poem, of course. I did not analyze the poem’s metrical pattern, its rhyme scheme,
its textual history, its biographical context, and its potential intertextual links.
One might also note, as Freeman does (1996: 194), that a hallmark of
Dickinson’s style is her deletion of several components from the question in the
first stanza: ‘The stiff Heart questions “was it He, that bore, [the pain] / And [did
he bear it] “Yesterday, or [did he bear it] Centuries before?”’. I agree that such
deletions ‘turn the reader into an active participant who must provide that which
is left unsaid’ (Freeman, 1996: 194), but I did not discuss these deletions. Nor did
I discuss the conditional statement, ‘Remembered, if outlived’, although just as
the persona seems absent-minded because of the grief she feels, so too is ‘the
agent of the remembering and the outliving [. . .] also missing’ (Freeman, 1996:
203). I could continue to list the things I have excluded from my discussion here
in order to demonstrate that cognitive rhetoric does not hold all the answers to
every possible question that could be put to the poem,4 but my decision to focus
on the poem’s figurative language is based on my opinion that a discussion of the
poem’s figures can help explain how readers realize the poem’s argument. In
other words, readers studying the poem might not notice the poem’s dominant
metrical pattern and yet still understand Dickinson’s argument about grief based
on their comprehension of Dickinson’s figurative language. Because the same
286 CRAIG HAMILTON

thing could be said about Dickinson’s analogies in both ‘The Brain – is wider
than the Sky’ and ‘The Heart is the Capital of the Mind’, I now wish to discuss
those two poems.
4 ‘The Brain – is wider than the Sky’ (F598)
In poem F598, ‘The Brain – is wider than the Sky’, Dickinson uses analogies to
define the mind in a not altogether straightforward manner. She avoids saying
directly what the ‘brain’ is; instead, she says what its properties are by
contrasting the brain with the sky, the sea, and God’s weight. Each stanza in the
poem begins with a debatable proposition, and then supports that proposition
with a qualifying clause that begins with ‘for’. The function of the proposition is
to introduce the first two items from the analogy; a function of the qualification
that supports the proposition is to introduce the last two items from the analogy.
In short, the poem’s three analogies follow this pattern. Although Dickinson’s
analogies are novel, they offer evidence for Turner’s claim that ‘[a]nalogies are
not structured between very like concepts’ and ‘analogies do not exist between
very like concepts’ (1991: 135). As Turner states:
To recognize a statement as an analogy is to recognize that it is in some way
putting pressure on our category structures. Therefore, the act of recognizing
analogy depends upon the details of our category structures. Principles of
recognizing a statement as an analogy are influenced by and reflect principles
of categorization. (1991: 122)
With respect to Dickinson, we might ask: how do her analogies put pressure
on our categories? At first glance, the analogy in stanza one is nonsense. A sky
that envelops a globe that is almost 23,000 miles in circumference is far ‘wider
than’ a brain that may be but inches in circumference and which is itself housed
within a small human skull. But if ‘Brain’ can mean ‘consciousness’ or ‘the seat
of the self’ (Gelpi, 1965: 99), then it need not be taken literally as the object
between your ears. So what drives the construction of the analogy is the word
‘contain’, which does put our categories under pressure. If consciousness is
‘wider than the Sky / For’ it can ‘contain’ not only the sky but also the poem’s
addressee, then the analogy entails categorizing the brain as a container and
thereby locating concepts like the sky within it when we have ‘put them side by
side’.5
The analogy in the second stanza can be spelled out as follows: just as a
sponge can retain water, so too can the brain ‘absorb’ the sea’s depth and its
color. The juxtaposition of these four items (sponge / water / brain / sea) is
provoked by Dickinson’s metonymic command to ‘hold them – Blue to Blue –’.
For Stonum, in this analogy ‘the mind, the comprehending agent, is larger than
the comprehended object’ (1990: 101). What Stonum’s use of the word ‘larger’

suggests is that Dickinson is arguing that the brain (Stonum would call it the
mind, Gelpi would call it consciousness or the seat of the self) is ‘more
significant’ than the sea. But how is this conclusion possible? One of our most
fundamental conceptual metaphors is IMPORTANT IS BIG (Lakoff and Turner, 1989:
206–7), which Grady (1999: 80) redefined as SIGNIFICANT IS LARGE. This is a
universal albeit conventional primary metaphor since in many unrelated
languages around the world – such as Zulu, Hawaiian, Turkish, Malay, and
Russian (Grady, 1999: 80) – people attribute importance to size, as in ‘Tomorrow
is a big day for me’. This attribution is one Dickinson counts on readers to make
as she argues for the brain’s significance and importance. Her analogies in
stanzas one and two, in other words, are means for arguing that the brain is
significant because it can ‘contain’ the sky and ‘absorb’ the sea. Again, as was
the case with ‘contain’ earlier, here the verb ‘absorb’ is also figurative, for a brain
cannot literally ‘absorb’ a sea. But Dickinson tells us it can because the brain is
analogous to a sponge in a bucket full of water, a sponge that can retain a volume
that is greater than its own. If this poem is ‘an examination of mental powers’
(Stonum, 1990: 100), that examination is embodied by the analogies readers
construct in order to better understand the mind and/or brain.
In the last stanza, the belief that the mind is infinite reappears when Dickinson
says it ‘is just the weight of God’. However, a sort of caveat is inserted into the
argument when she suggests that the only difference in weight between the mind
and God is the same difference in weight that exists between ‘Syllable’ and
‘Sound’. As was the case in the previous stanza, where four elements for the
analogy were present (brain / sponge / sea / water in bucket), four elements are
also present here (brain’s weight / God’s weight / syllable / sound). A conditional
statement (‘if they do’) introduces the caveat. As Sweetser has argued, the reason
why such pleonastic uses of ‘if’ are pragmatically acceptable in everyday
discourse is that ‘it is often useful to display the train of reasoning leading to the
conclusion expressed’ (1990: 131). One of the functions of ‘if’, however, is ‘to
argue from an already shared belief of speaker and hearer to a not-yet-shared
belief’ (Sweetser, 1990: 129), which suggests that Dickinson uses the phrase ‘if
they do’ in a way that is more conditional than counterfactual. This is due to the
fact that once readers agree that the first two items in the analogy (the brain’s
weight and God’s weight) are equivalent, then the belief that syllable could
‘differ’ from sound (the last two items in the analogy) can become a belief shared
by both persona and addressee, a belief which may help to seal the poem’s
argument, as it were.
5 ‘The Heart is the Capital of the Mind’ (F1381)
Dickinson once again turns to analogy in Poem F1381, ‘The Heart is the Capital
of the Mind’, this time in an argument against mind–body dualism. Grammati-
cally, the form of the poem’s title metaphor can be understood as follows: Noun
288 CRAIG HAMILTON

Phrase be Noun Phrase of Noun Phrase. These patterns are ‘XYZ metaphors’ and
their semantics can be schematized as follows: ‘X is the Y of Z’ (Turner, 1991:
201). In the first line of Dickinson’s poem, therefore, the following pattern is
recognizable:
● Phrase: ‘The Heart is the Capital of the Mind’
● Syntax: NP be NP of NP
● Semantics: X is the Y of Z
● Analogy: X is to Z as Y is to W.
Dickinson’s opening line asks readers to vividly connect the body and the mind
via analogical mappings. It prompts readers to understand ‘the Heart’ as ‘the
Capital of the Mind’ by leading them to grasp certain cross-domain relationships:
Source: Political Entity Target: Human Being
Capital (Y) Heart (X)
Country (W) Mind (Z)
Dickinson explicitly provides elements X, Y, and Z, but W is implicitly evoked.
In order to understand the relationship between the heart (X) and the mind (Z),
readers must understand analogically the relationship a capital (Y) has to an
entity such as a country (W). Doing so leads readers to see that what the heart
(X) is to the mind (Z) a capital (Y) is to a country (W). Because W is implicit
rather than explicit, readers implicitly supply it to complete the pattern and
process the figurative expression. This may be why Stonum has said that
Dickinson’s poetry is ‘designed more to stimulate responses in the reader’, which
‘encourages a reader’s coming into his own’ (1990: 90).
Exactly how readers ‘come into their own’ with lines like ‘The Heart is
the Capital of the Mind’ can be accounted for by conceptual blending theory
(Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). Dickinson’s line provokes an analogy
(X:Z :: Y:W), a pattern evoked by elements X, Y, and Z but completed only
when readers actively supply element W as they read. What makes such an
analogy so creative, of course, is that when Y and Z are blended to result in the
concept of ‘the capital of the mind’, this becomes a memorable means for
defining the heart. In fact, ideas like these lead Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 14)
to state ‘that analogy, as a cognitive operation, [is] intricate, powerful, and
fundamental’ and that analogy ‘has traditionally been viewed as a powerful
engine of discovery’. Within the context of Dickinson’s poem, the opening
analogy is just such an example of a ‘discovery’ that is ‘powerful’.
Just as we saw with Dickinson’s principled choice of words in ‘After great
pain, a formal feeling comes’, metaphoric cohesion is again visible in this poem
when Dickinson situates ‘Heart’, ‘Mind’, ‘Continent’, and ‘Yourself’ within the
target input, and ‘Capital’, ‘State’, ‘Population’, and ‘Nation’ within the source
input. The relationship between these eight terms in the two inputs helps create

the cohesion we sense, although two of the eight terms (continent and state)
might seem out of place. ‘State’ can refer to different things, including a mood or
attitude, but it also refers to a political entity which coheres with the other items
in the source input. After all, in ‘The Mind is a single State’, line two of the
poem, the target is mind rather than state. As for ‘Continent’, it is more a
geographical entity than a political one since of the world’s seven continents only
Australia contains a single nation-state within it. To return to metaphoric
cohesion in Dickinson’s poem, her choice of words allows her poem to answer a
series of important questions. What is the mind? A ‘single State’. What is the
heart? The ‘Capital of the Mind’. What do the heart and mind make when
combined? A ‘single Continent’. If the mind and body are one continent, then
what is that continent’s ‘Population’? ‘One’ person who is ‘Numerous enough’.
What is a population of one? An ‘ecstatic Nation’ that you should ‘Seek’. Why?
It is ‘Yourself’.
These questions and their answers may lend a dialogic structure to the poem.
However, they may also seem but a simplistic paraphrase of the poem, a poem
which itself is a variation on the ‘Know thyself’ motto of Socrates. Nevertheless,
the questions reveal how Dickinson continually defines and redefines her terms.
The heart is defined, the mind is defined, and then what the heart and mind
‘together make’ is defined (a ‘single Continent’). In the last stanza, ‘Continent’
then undergoes redefinition and becomes ‘Yourself’. That returns the reader back
to the beginning. What is ‘Yourself’? Your mind and body combined in a single
entity, according to Dickinson, an entity you have to search for. Clearly, what
Cameron calls ‘Dickinson’s Poems of Definition’ (1979: 26–55) includes poem
F1381. However, we also have an example here of what Lakoff (1996: 91) has
called the ‘Metaphor System for Conceptualizing the Self’, whereby the ‘self’ is
thought of as an object that can be lost, found, or looked for. There are also
possible connections with ‘Yourself’ to mental space theory given a rule that
Freeman sees operating in many of Dickinson’s poems: ‘Whenever a subject
referent in one (originating) space projects a mental space (target) via a trigger or
space-builder, its pronoun counterpart in the target space will take the
corresponding -self anaphor form’ (Freeman, 1997: 14). When the imperative
‘Seek’ is used in line 8, and a second-person addressee (You) is entailed by the
imperative, then the choice to use ‘Yourself’ in that line is entirely understandable.
Again, this is something I have not fully discussed because of my focus on
Dickinson’s figures and the contribution they make to the poem’s argument.
Cognitive rhetoric, therefore, does not produce exhaustive interpretations of
works.
6 Conclusion
At this point, skeptics might raise several objections to what I have said in this
article. First, there is my choice of the Franklin edition. By making that choice, I
290 CRAIG HAMILTON

realize I am favoring an imperfect typeset edition of Dickinson’s poems over the
handwritten manuscript versions of the poems that can be found in the fascicles.
That is, I am privileging ‘linguistic codes’ over ‘bibliographic codes’ (McGann,
1991: 56) in a way that, in all honesty, most critics do. The absence of a single
authoritative edition of the poems that all Dickinson scholars will accept as the
accurate public record of her work means critics can either use this as an excuse
to ignore Dickinson’s poetry or make the best of an imperfect situation and
analyze her poetry.
Second, my assumptions about what ‘readers’ do as they read Dickinson’s
poems have not been empirically validated for the purposes specific to this
article. While Smith and Hart have proposed that Susan Huntington Dickinson,
Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law, was the poet’s ‘primary reader’, that could be ‘a
stretch considering Dickinson’s rich correspondence with intellectuals like
Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Samuel Bowles’ (Tursi, 1998), men to whom
Dickinson also sent poems. Additionally, Dickinson offered poem F1368 (‘Opon
a lilac sea’) to Helen Hunt Jackson for her wedding, which is perhaps another
example of a poem Dickinson addressed to a specific reader (Freeman, 1996:
199). Information like this may account for the ‘the tangible immediacy’ (West,
1993: 34) of some of Dickinson’s poems, especially given that the closer the
relationship between participants in a discourse, the more implicit the speaker’s
discourse becomes (Freeman, 1996: 192), and yet, until my assumptions are
falsified, I find it reasonable to believe that the cognitive processes of simile,
metaphor, and analogy that I have outlined here occur with equal regularity
within the minds of most of Dickinson’s readers.
Third, my belief that a rhetoric of poetry is possible may seem misguided to
those who would make hard and fast distinctions between rhetoric and poetics.
Rhetorical criticism for many years appeared to be merely an exercise in labeling
or identifying the rhetorical figures the critic found in the text. But how many
readers, for example, really recognize chiasmus or antimetabole when they see
it? Moreover, is that recognition vital to comprehension, or is it not? Or, put
another way, how does identification relate to interpretation and explanation?
While this article has not addressed empirical questions like these, I think it safe
to say that figure identification is neither interpretation nor explanation. That
said, cognitive rhetoricians might study the relations between identification,
explanation, and interpretation in order to see if cognitive rhetoric has an answer
to this question.
Fourth, cognitive rhetoric may help critics answer some questions about
Dickinson’s poems in particular, and poetry in general, but I want to make it
clear that it will never have all the answers to all the questions critics might put
to a given text. For example, a critic might want to interpret poem F1381, ‘The
Heart is the Capital of the Mind’, along historical or political lines. This critic
would note that the poem was written around 1875 in the context of post-Civil
War America. In this context, words like ‘Capital’ and ‘Nation’ could seem
important to this critic because the mind–body unification suggested by the poem

could be interpreted with reference to the aftermath of the Civil War and attempts
to reunite the country during the Reconstruction period. Additionally, the quest
suggested by the word ‘Continent’, as well as the poem’s last line, could be
related to the 19th-century political theory of manifest destiny and the expansion
of America’s so-called frontier. This is all fine and dandy, and cognitive rhetoric
may offer little to critics engaging in this kind of interpretative activity. One
thing cognitive rhetoric can do, however, is suggest that Dickinson’s figurative
language is difficult to overlook for anyone wanting to interpret the poem. After
all, what would be the point of trying to interpret poem F1381 by intentionally
ignoring its powerful figures?
Finally, discussing only three poems when Franklin (Dickinson, 1999: 4)
estimates that Dickinson wrote nearly 1800 of them may limit my generalizations
here. However, the metaphors, similes, and analogies from poems F372, F598,
and F1381 lead me to conclude that the cognitive rhetoric of Dickinson’s poetry
in particular, and most poetry in general, is figurative language. Why? Figurative
language offers the most productive means for conveying memorable and
persuasive arguments. At the very least, a cognitive rhetoric of Dickinson’s
poetry allows us to follow in Freeman’s footsteps and counter the misguided
opinion of some critics, namely that ‘Dickinson is thought to have no poetics’
(Freeman, 2002: 75). Perhaps there are some poets who ‘have no poetics’.
Dickinson was certainly not one of them.
Acknowledgement
I thank an anonymous reviewer at Language and Literature for feedback on this version of the
article, and Mark Turner and Stan Plumly for feedback on an early draft.
Notes
1 In this section of the article, I let the poems to speak for themselves rather than reproduce them
in full where, in subsequent sections, I analyze the figures in them.
2 Poems reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The
Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, ed. Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, MA: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
3 Dickinson’s imagery and diction have led some critics to think of her as the first Imagist poet
(West, 1993: 27).
4 Because few texts have ever ‘narrowly constrained the set of questions the readers have posed’
(Dillon, 1982: 77), it would appear there is no limit to the number of questions critics can put to
a text. This in turn implies there is no limit to the things readers can say about a text.
Interpretation, in other words, is simply a world without end.
5 This concept of containment might relate to what Freeman has discovered about Dickinson’s
poems overall: ‘The contrast between Frost’s and Dickinson’s poetics, then, is based on the
quite different metaphorical schemas of PATH and BALANCE on the one hand and CONTAINER and
CHANGE on the other that inform their poetics and underlie not only the semantics of the poems
but also their poetic form’ (Freeman, 2002: 77).
292 CRAIG HAMILTON

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Address
Craig Hamilton, Humanities Program, 185 H.I.B., University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
[email: cahamilt@uci.edu]
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