What mystery pervades a well!

Dickinson’s poem deals with the arrogance that people often feel in the face of nature as a result of not understanding it very well. This idea is particularly overt in the third stanza:

The grass does not appear afraid,

I often wonder he

Can stand so close and look so bold

At what is awe to me (Lines 9-12).

The grass (here personified as male) feels no fear or awe in the face of fathomless power. Its unearned confidence parallels that of the male naturalists studying nature with a lack of respect to the great feminine mystery behind it. The speaker’s tone in this stanza is ambivalent—vaguely envious of the grass’s ability to withstand “what is awe to me” while at the same time aware that the sublimity the speaker is experiencing is a sign of greater wisdom and understanding.

The metaphor continues into the fourth stanza, observing the wild sedge grass at the seaside: “Where he is floorless / And does no timidity betray” (Lines 19-20). The relationship here is the same as that between the grass and the well, with one key difference: The sedge grows on unstable ground, in danger of collapsing into

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