16 pages • 32 minutes read
Emily DickinsonWhat Soft — Cherubic Creatures
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1896A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The form of “What Soft—Cherubic Creatures” is compact and tidy. The poem is a lyric, so its shape is small, and the lines are relatively even. The stanzas contribute to the organized appearance because each stanza contains four lines, which means all three stanzas are quatrains. The poem doesn’t abide by any traditional meter, yet the poem comes close to syllabics, which is when the poet establishes a pattern according to the number of syllables in each line but isn’t concerned about the unstressed/stressed pattern. The first line in every stanza has seven syllables; the second line in every stanza has six syllables; the last line in each stanza has six syllables; but the second-to-last line in the stanzas upends the pattern as Line 3 has nine syllables and Lines 7 and 11 have seven syllables.
Perhaps Dickinson subverts her meter just as she undercuts norms about gentlewomen and their supposed virtue. At the same time, the tidy form undercuts Dickinson’s message: Her speaker chastises gentlewomen for their “[h]orror” (Line 6) of disorderly, imperfect reality, yet Dickinson’s poem is far from messy.
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition emphasizes contrasts between two ostensibly unlike ideas, but it also allows for insightful comparisons. Juxtaposition propels Dickinson’s poem because her speaker compares the “Gentlewomen” (Line 2) to the “Deity” (Line 8). By pairing the upper-class women with Jesus Christ, Dickinson’s poem shows how they conflict. Dickinson complicates the juxtaposition by initially reinforcing that the gentlewomen are angels, “Cherubic Creatures” (Line 1), or on the side of God and religion.
By the end of Stanza 2, the speaker separates the gentlewomen from God when they say, “Of Deity—ashamed” (Line 8). The juxtaposition between the gentlewomen and their Deity, Jesus Christ, emphasizes how the norms that govern the lives of the privileged gentlewomen are incompatible with the teachings of Christ. The gentlewomen are lavish and “refined” (Line 6), while Christ is “common” (Line 9) and befriends fishermen. Neither seems to like the other, as the speaker concedes that Christ is “ashamed” (Line 12) of the gentlewomen. The juxtaposition makes the antagonism between Jesus and the gentlewomen palpable, and the literary device helps deliver the message that the upper classes aren’t automatically virtuous or worthy of emulation.
Personification
Personification is a figure of speech that infuses nonhuman subjects with human traits. The purpose of personification is to make the nonhuman subject more relatable. In “What Soft—Cherubic Creatures,” Dickinson uses personification with fabric and stars: “One would as soon assault a Plush— / Or violate a Star” (Lines 3-4). The two lines represent personification because plush fabric and stars are not human, so they do not have human emotions. They are also not subject to human laws, which means a person can’t get in legal trouble for “violat[ing]” (Line 4) or “assault[ing]” (Line 3) them.
Dickinson also employs reverse personification when she associates the human gentlewomen with the nonhuman realm of plush and stars. The gentlewomen, too, are celestial, delicate subjects. They are, at least in Stanza 1, more delicate and valuable than luxurious fabric or a romanticized, astronomical subject. In humanizing the stars and plush, this emphasizes the gentlewomen’s lack of humanity, which gains momentum in the following lines, where they can’t tolerate “freckled Human Nature” (Line 7), and when Christ, the savior of humankind, is “ashamed” (Line 8) of them.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
