I LIKE TO SEE IT LAP THE MILES:
SO WHAT?

There are a couple of things that anyone studying Emily Dickinson’s poetry should know before starting.

The first is that she never left her house. Well, she did go away to school for a year or so, but she didn’t like it. And she went out into the garden once in a while. But that was about it.

 She just wrote poems, about 1,775 in total, then stuffed them away under her bed. That took some of her time, though, as you can tell, what does it take to write sixteen lines of poetry? Maybe a half hour, if you throw in coffee and bathroom breaks? The rest of her day was spent weeping, probably—if any fans of hers try to tell you “she actually had a marvelously sublime sense of humor,” take another gander at her picture. A real cut-up, that one.

Somehow, though, even as a recluse, Emily Dickinson was able to write about a whole world of subjects, and she surprisingly wasn’t just limited to things like “My Pillows,” “My Dresser,” “My Cat” and “My Dresser (Revisited).” 

The second thing that readers need to know about her is that most of Emily Dickinson's poems can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Not all of them, just the good ones. Go ahead, try it with this one—no, not “Red River Valley,” I said “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” See? This is something that English teachers reveal to their classes to make Dickinson’s poems relevant, as only “The Yellow Rose of Texas” can.

 There’s not much to say about the other ones, the poems that don’t fit “The Yellow Rose of Texas” – Mr. Poetical has experimented with “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” and “Come On Eileen,” and will keep you posted.

Emily Dickinson wrote some wonderful poems and some really awful ones, and the problem is that everyone except official poets has a hard time telling which are which. “I Like to See It Lap the Miles,” though it is dumped often enough into poetry anthologies, doesn't really represent one of her finest moments.

Readers who have seen this poem before may take a moment now to feel superior, as they imagine the dropped jaws of those learning just now that the mile-lapping "it" discussed in the poem is a train. "Oh, I thought it sounded like a horse," most people blurt out. Of course you did. Emily Dickinson wanted the train to sound like a horse. Get it? It laps, and licks, and neighs and goes to a stable. Horses do those things, but don’t trains do them, too? Sure, Emily. Sure they do.

Poems that present riddles like this can be a huge pain in the neck, unless they have the answer written upside-down at the bottom of the page. To give Dickinson credit, she lived in the middle of the nineteenth century, when people usually hung around with horses, and trains were new. Maybe this was revolutionary stuff then.

 Or maybe, being a shut-in, she was confused when she saw a train out her window and thought, "Wow, there goes the biggest %*$&)(@-ing horse I have ever seen, chasing itself on wheels, blowing steam out of the top of its head." Confusion like this might even help explain why she shut herself off from the world: would you go out, if you thought the world was teeming with dog-cars and squirrelicycles?

Daffy as she was, though, Dickinson was also probably smart enough to know what a train was. That leaves just one other explanation for this poem: she was fascinated by the fact that people used to travel by horse but (“now,” to her) traveled by train.

Her fascination has fascinated generations of fans, who think that Emily Dickinson, being sensitive and perceptive, must have been onto something that we people who ride neither horses nor trains can appreciate. Foolish us.

Oh, and she amps up the eternal relevance of the poem by throwing in a little religion. Poets: if the poem you are writing seems a little lightweight—say it’s a simple extended metaphor between two modes of transportation no one will care about in the future, or it’s a close observation of something that you stared at really hard for six hours one morning when other people were at work, or it’s about the Man from Nantucket and his prodigious endowment—then throw a little religion in, and your silly little trifle instantly becomes Something More Important.

In this case, Dickinson says that the train you thought was a horse neighs “like Boanerges.” What is Boanerges, you ask? It’s the surname Jesus gave to brothers James and John in the Bible (and foolish you thought that was “Conklin”), and it was commonly used to describe a loud, blowhard preacher. So what’s it got to do with horses neighing or with trains? Good question. “Something, something, Jesus talked to his Disciples, something” (or, for modern audiences, “Something, something, word that sounds like ‘boner,’ something”—if you are a twelve-year-old boy, or one in spirit, look Boanerges up at Dictionary.com, where a sexy-voiced woman whispers it over and over again if you keep clicking the right button).