Analysis of "I never say a moor" by Emily Dickinson
Uploaded by fiwer on Mar 29, 2005
“I never saw a moor” is a short poem of only two quatrain stanzas. It is Emily Dickinson’s’ well thought out approach to try and explain a difficult religious belief.
The first stanza states that even though the poet has never seen a “moor” (l. 1) (old English for mountain or uncultivated upland) and never seen a sea before she knows about their existence. She announces that even without seeing the “moor” she knows what is looks like “Yet know I how the heater looks…” (l. 3-4) and without seeing the sea she has knowledge of what it is “And what a wave must be” (l. 4). Basically stating that just because something cannot doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
In the second and last stanza the speaker states that even though she “never spoke with God” (l. 5), nor “visited…heaven”, just as the "moor" or "the sea", she is just as certain they exist. Using this logical theory, she uses it to explain her certainty of God's existence demostrated in "Yet certain am I of the spot/As if the chart were given."