While Dickinson’s poem, “The Only News I Know,” is obviously an exaggeration, it, nevertheless, dramatizes the most important topics with which the poet likes to engage: immortality, eternity, and God. She likes to occupy her thinking and musing with ethereal places and events.
The physical world is such a cold and often lonely place for sensitive souls, and once those souls acquire some inkling of a different world, a spiritual level of existence, or an astral world, they prefer it. They inquire, read, and study about the possibility of a place where the soul lives on after it leaves the gross physical body—a place where it lives more abundantly and completely without the trammels and trappings of earthy existence.
Dickinson’s “The Only News I Know” consists of four tercets, or three-line stanzas. Each tercet adheres to its own rime scheme: ABC, ABA, AAB, ABC. Each line displays seven syllables, except for the final line in the final tercet, which yields only four syllables. The four-syllable line gives the poem an abruptness that further enhances the meaning of the content: the speaker makes her claims in crispness and ends in a snap.
First Tercet: “The Only News I know”
In the first stanza, the speaker asserts that the only information she recognizes is that which comes from “Immortality.” She claims she receives “Bulletins all Day / From Immortality.” This speaker is more interested in mystical, that is, spiritual awareness than she is in mundane earthly things.
Second Tercet: “The Only Shows I see”
The speaker then avers that the only programs or performances she watches are those that pertain similarly to “Immortality,” and she suggests that perhaps this time frame is permanent. She leaves open some doubt, probably, for the sake of skeptical listeners, for she is certain of both her “Immortality” and “Eternity.”
Third Tercet: “The Only One I meet”
The speaker then reveals her startling claim, as she is wont to do: “The Only One I meet / Is God.” And instead of further drama or explication on meeting God, she rushes on mid-line to claim that the only path she travels is that of “Existence.” This “street” she “traverse[s]” freely.
Fourth Tercet: “If Other News there be”
Then the speaker declares that if, in fact, she ever acquires any other significant information, she will let her listeners know about it. But her matter-of-fact declamations have made it quite clear that she does not expect such “Other News” to assail her senses.
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