What Soft — Cherubic Creatures

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.