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Emily DickinsonWe never know how high we are
Emily DickinsonFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1880A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Like Emily Dickinson’s other poems, “We never know how high we are” features idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation. Although heroism, cubits, and king aren’t proper nouns, Dickinson makes them into proper nouns by capitalizing them. It’s as if Dickinson is thinking of “Heroism” (Line 5) and “Cubits” (Line 7) as people and has a specific “King” (Line 8) in mind. In “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Dickinson capitalizes “Nobody,” “Somebody,” “Frog,” “June,” and “Bog.” Out of these words, the only conventional proper noun is June, as it’s one of the 12 months. Perhaps Dickinson’s nonstandard punctuation reflects her stature. Maybe she is too grand to follow normal rules of grammar.
Dickinson is not the only poet to adapt peculiar punctuation. In her “introduction” to The Essential Emily Dickinson (2016), Joyce Carol Oates says the English poet William Blake (1757-1827) possesses a “kinship with Dickinson’s work.” In “London” (1794), Blake capitalizes common nouns like “Church,” “Soldiers,” and “Palace.” Similar to “We never know how high we are,” Blake’s poem doesn’t end with a period. Both seemed to view their poems as open-ended or ongoing.
Although Blake was a little before their time, he is often associated with the Romantic poets. The Romantics consisted of 19th-century poets and writers who put imagination and emotion before rationality, technology, and science. Dickinson read many Romantic poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia sees Dickinson as a part of the Romantic lineage. With “We never know how high we are,” Dickinson cast doubt on the ability of humans to see themselves. The speaker suggests that the human propensity of measuring and quantifying leads not to progress but restriction.
Dickinson's poem also connects to her American peers like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). As Dickinson did in her poem, these writers created individual definitions of heroism and royalty. Emerson equates heroism with the sky. In his essay “Nature” (1836), Emerson says, “An act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle.” In his book Walden (1854), Thoreau expresses skepticism about society’s version of heroism. He argues that true royalty relates not to extravagance but simplicity and comfort.
Historical Context
Based on her handwriting and the type of paper used, Thomas Johnson believes Emily Dickinson composed “We never know how high we are” around 1870. The Civil War between the Union and the Confederacy ended in 1865. The Union defeated the Southern states and abolished slavery. Although secluded, Dickinson was acutely aware of the lethal impact of the war. The Civil War killed 31 men from Amherst, including the son of the president of Amherst College, Frazar Stearnes. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, one of Dickinson’s main pen pals, commanded a unit of Black soldiers for the Union. In the context of America’s Civil War, Dickinson’s poem speaks to the heroism displayed in this battle. People in Amherst and across the country were “called to rise,” and the heroism that Americans witnessed was not an everyday occurrence.
The poem also relates to America’s war against England and its ultimate victory and independence. The “fear to be a King” (Line 8) reflects America’s anxiety over becoming a country like England. For America’s founders, kings were anathema. They represented tyranny and inequality when America wanted to symbolize equality and democracy — a place where governments weren’t forced on people but elected by them. In this historical context, “the Cubits warp” (Line 7) is a form of humbleness. It acknowledges that no human has the right to rule over another person.
Dickinson and another major 19th-century poet, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), are often juxtaposed. Joyce Carol Oates writes that Dickinson and Whitman “have come to represent the extreme, idiosyncratic poles of the American psyche.” Dickinson’s private, compact poems symbolize interiority, and Whitman’s robust, public poems represent exteriority. Yet “We never know how high we are” collapses the binary. In "We never know how high we are," Dickinson, like Whitman, celebrates the potential of America. In the land of democracy, anyone has the capacity to rise to great heights and feel like they are touching the sky. America’s historical stature is the land of opportunity. Dickinson captures this reputation in her poem just as Whitman captures the stature attached to the United States in several of his poems. For example, in “America” (1888), Whitman claims the citizens of the United States are “strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich.”
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