Emily Dickinson's poem "It Sifts from Leaden Sieves" at first glance appears to be a simple riddle, with the obvious answer being snow. As is typical of Dickinson's poetry, there is much to be found within for contemplation and her profound perspective of nature, life, and the human condition shines forth. Written in simple, mostly monosyllabic words and with a masterful use of poetic devices she produces some powerful themes within the beautiful imagery.
Though the words are simple and the poem is among the easier to understand of her almost 1800 poems she produced uring her lifetime, it is a technically complex poem that has at least two meaningful and powerful themes hidden within. As is typical of much of Dickinson's poetry most of the rhyme is 'slant', or words that do not quite rhyme such as wood and road. Composed of five, four line stanzas, with the rhyme scheme abcb defe, etc. or the first three and last stanza, with the third stanza's scheme of JklJ.
With this interruption of the meter she effectively stresses a break in the poem's imagery development to stress a change. It is also a pivotal point in the poem's theme, too, as she reflects on the barren land after the autumn harvest. It almost can be sung, the flow of the words' sound almost as pleasing as the imagery of the snowy countryside scene she depicts.With heavy use of metaphor she describes the winter scene while never using a word that normally is associated with weather such as frozen, snow, or temperature references.
In the last two lines of the first stanza, she cleverly uses the cold, white marble like stone alabaster and blanket of wool to represent snow with he words "It fills with Alabaster Wool The Wrinkles of the Road-" (Dickinson lines 3-4).Her puzzling use of punctuation and hyphenated pauses mostly creates metrical rhythm throughout and adds to the lilting qualities, although the pause at the end of the poem leaves question as to the author's intentions. With assonance and alliteration used throughout with words such as "sifts" and "sieves", "wood, wool, and road", "fills" and "wrinkles", and others it is a pleasure for the reader to speak and invites to be read aloud.The repeated sounds of word interior consonants, or onsonance, also plays a role in adding to the verbal flow of the poem with the sounds of the words "all, fills, alabaster, wool, wrinkles, and stump, stack, stem, and wrists, posts, ghosts" More of the beautiful imagery of the poem is obvious when it is paraphrased and also reveals the emotional theme of the peace and tranquility that is experienced in the leaden silence of a heavy snowfall.This is the poem paraphrased-Snow falls silently from dark and heavy clouds and sprinkles the forest and roads that are blanketed in white, it fills in and equals out the mountains and he valleys in a continuous blanket covering fences in a heavenly sheet, all the remains of the summer's harvest in the fields with covered with snow and showing not a clue, beautifully highlighting the remaining exposed features, then vanishing in a vapor, leaving no traces of their presence.It instantly reminds anybody that has ever experienced a winter storm of this beauty in nature, and of the peace and beauty in the purity of the clean snow.
Dickinson also makes the reader subliminally realize the perceptual pleasure and heightened imagery of the scene by associating
