There is no Frigate like a Book

Dickinson arranged “There is no Frigate like a Book” into eight lines of alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. This meter is often associated with Christian hymns, as many of them have been constructed to fit the same form. This shared meter allows the hymns to be interchangeable over a shared piece of music. Though Dickinson stopped attending church services in her early twenties, most of her poetry is written using hymn meter. The use of this meter in “There is no Frigate like a Book” points toward and reinforces religious interpretations of the text.

Unlike many of Dickinson’s works, the meter in “There is no Frigate” is remarkably consistent. Dickinson’s use of capital letters helps to reinforce this consistent meter by forcing the reader to place their emphasis at the beginning of each capitalized word. This means that the emphases in line 5 should scan “This Traverse may the poorest take.” The poem reflects this attention to metrical consistency when it compares the horse’s movement to “prancing Poetry” (Line 5).

The punctuation in “There is no Frigate” is, like that in most of Dickinson’s poetry, highly irregular. Dickinson often uses em-dashes (—) instead of standard punctuation marks.