Topic 3 (session B) - Patterns, Deviations, Style and Meaning > Parallelism, deviation & 'The Brain - is wider than the Sky -' > Task B - semantic analysis

Parallelism, deviation and 'The Brain - is wider than the Sky -'

Task B - Accessible / text version

We'd now like you to look in detail at each stanza in turn.

Your task is to search for semantic oddities and relate them to your overall understanding, and then compare your findings with ours.

Our findings for Stanza 1

The word 'Brain' at first sight appears to be literal - referring to (iterations of) the physical object inside human skulls. 'The Brain' can thus have the same kind of reference as 'the leg' - which can refer to an individual leg or to legs in general. Brains literally have width, and you can literally (if only in rather specific, medical circumstances usually!) put a particular brain side by side with some other physical object.

But brains are usually only a few inches wide. If you talked of someone having a brain a mile wide you would clearly be exaggerating for some rhetorical purpose. And there is a problem in saying that the brain is wider than the sky, because the sky does not have width in any normal sense of the term. It is just an effect of the reflection of light seen from the surface of the earth. If the sky can be said to have width, it must be at least a bit wider than the earth, which it 'surrounds' and could arguably be infinite, given that space is infinite. It is all this which helps us to see that the brain, although it is used in some ways as if it were a physical object, is also being used metaphorically. This is what helps us to see the idea that the noun 'brain' stands for 'mind' here.

Note also that there is a CONTAINER metaphor being used *. In what sense can it be said that the brain can CONTAIN the sky? It is this metaphorisation which leads to the idea that the brain/mind can be seen as 'containing' the sky - in the sense that it can imagine or comprehend it. Notice also that the brain can also contain 'You'. This second use of the container metaphor leads us to infer in general terms that the brain/mind can imagine/comprehend other beings which have brains/minds, and even comprehend the being which itself is a part of. These are, of course, rather important properties of humanness. It is often said that we can be self-reflexive and also understand our environment in abstract ways in which other animals cannot.

* If you want to know more about container metaphors, try:
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 11-12, 29-32, 50-1 and 92-6.

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Our findings for Stanza 2

Stanza 2 is semantically parallel to stanza 1 (a) in the continuation of the brain topic in terms of concrete + abstract reference and (b) in the continued use of the CONTAINER metaphor in relation to the brain. The brain/mind can 'contain' the sea, just as it could contain the sky. This time, though, the relation is done in terms of depth, not width, and we have a particular style of containment that is possible only for liquids. Liquids can be contained not just by being put in a container, but also by being soaked up. This is what makes the last line of the stanza so startling. The reference to the sponge suggests the specific liquid style of containment, but the word 'buckets' suggests the standard kind (which we then have to reject mentally as impossible). Moreover, 'bucket' is itself a container which prototypically holds liquids. This is how we know in this stanza that the sponges do not contain actual buckets, but amounts of water (e.g. bucketfuls). So we have another strikingly different way of expressing the same general semantic relationship we saw in the first stanza.

Note also the 'Blue to Blue' equivalent of 'side by side' in the first stanza. This is foregrounded not just by its grammatical parallelism with 'side by side' in stanza 1, but because of the clash between the blue designation and our standard colour assumptions for brains (grey). Because blue is associated with the sky as well as the sea (and indeed this association has been invoked by the first stanza), this brings in more associations between the brain and the mind as a comprehending/imagining instrument of infinite proportions (cf. 'wide blue yonder' etc).

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Our findings for Stanza 3

The metaphorical structure of the final stanza deviates from the pattern we have seen in the first two stanzas, suggesting that we should view it as both climactic (the third stanza with the brain as topic) and different. We still get the encapsulation of the brain as partly physical object and partly abstract (mental properties). But this time the metaphor used is not the CONTAINER metaphor but the BALANCE metaphor, seen here in terms of the scales on which the brain and God are weighed. But note that although brains can literally be said to have weight, it is not at all obvious that God can. He does not have physical being in any obvious sense, even if we assume the Christian view that man is made in God's image and that his son, Christ, lived on earth as a human for around 30 years. Moreover, because the Christian concept of God is all-powerful, this suggests that the brain/mind is even more important than we have assumed so far - indeed we are being invited to see it as equivalent to God, and we may well be led to wonder at the end of the poem whether God made man or man made God (a common theological debate).

Note that the word 'heft', meaning 'weigh' is archaic and dialectal in British English, but still current in American English (and Emily Dickinson was American, of course).

Finally, we are told that if the brain and God differ they only do so in the way that syllables and sounds differ. Given the context, it appears that not all sounds (e.g. the sound of falling rain) are relevant but only speech sounds (phonemes). The thing about syllables and speech sounds is that, although they are different they are inextricably linked. Phonemes are the set of sounds in a language that distinguish one word from another. So we know that /p/ and /b/ are phonemes because the alternation between them is what makes the word /pit/ on the one hand and the word /bit/ on the other. Syllables are rhythmic groupings of syllables inside words which are (a) composed of one or more phonemes (usually with a vowel at their centre) and (b) can have larger or smaller amounts of stress assigned to them. In the word /kmpju:t«/, /km/, / pju:/ and / t«/ So syllables and sounds are different from one another, but so closely connected that you can't properly talk about the one without invoking the other. This idea in relation to the mind and God clearly connects back to the religious debates mentioned earlier about whether God invented man or man invented God.

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