Emily Dickinson's winter poem, "Like Brooms of Steel," dramatizes the cold stillness of the season for the always-observant poet who saw "New Englandly."
“Like Brooms of Steel” consists of eleven lines. Only two lines rime: “Had swept the Winter Street” and “Faint Deputies of Heat.” A reader might argue that some lines are slant-rimed, such as “Bird” and “tied” or “Steed” and “played.” But those would be rather a stretch, even for Dickinson.
Metallic winter
In “Like Brooms of Steel,” the speaker observes winter’s influence on the landscape: “Like Brooms of Steel / The Snow and Wind / Had swept the Winter Street.” The street appears to have been swept by steel brooms. But the sweeper is not the big snow plow that slogs through the winter streets clearing them of snow; those were not yet available in this time of horse drawn carriages.
No, it is the “Snow and Wind” that causes the streets to appear steel-broom swept. Dickinson often likens snow to metal; in another poem, she metaphorically compares snowfall to flouring a cutting board in the kitchen in crafting the line, “It sifts from leaden sieves.”
The silence of cold
Next, she observes that the “House was hooked” while the “Sun sent out / Faint Deputies of Heat.” The house could only remain caught in the grip of the winter cold, because the sun seemed able to dispatch only small amounts of warmth.
In this scene, the bird remains in silence, not singing cheerfully as in spring: “The Silence tied / His ample — plodding Steed.” Colorfully, the speaker attributes the bird’s movement to riding a horse, which the silence of the coldness has “tied.”
Playing apple
The only movement is the “Apple in the Cellar,” which is “snug.” The speaker emphasizes the utter stillness that the cold has brought by claiming that the snug apple is the only “one that played.”
Obviously, the stored apples would hardly play, since they are wrapped up tight in order to be preserved. But by claiming this impossibility, the speaker ironically exaggerates the stillness that the bitter cold has wrought on everything: the streets, the house, the sun, the bird.
Please Note: Internet Error
Several sites (for example, Poets.org) that feature this poem have misplaced the line “The Apple in the Cellar snug” after “Faint Deputies of Heat.” By doing so, the meaning of the poem is changed, and instead of the “apple” being the only “one that played,” the steed becomes the only on that played. That might seem to make more sense than saying that an “apple” was the only one that played.
The problem is, however, that the speaker has said that silence has “tied” or stilled the steed; he is not moving, which means that the bird is not moving. So to claim that the steed in playing gives motion to the bird, which the speaker claims is still.
The only thing that makes sense is that the speaker is exaggerating the stillness by saying that the snug apple is playing. The irony of a playing apple does not contradict the stillness that the speaker is painting, while the playing steed would violate and confuse that meaning.
Other Dickinson articles:
- Dickinson’s Slant of Light: Intuition Through Winter Melancholy
- December Poet – Emily Dickinson: Dickinson’s “Twas just this time, last year, I died”
- Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly buzz”: Mystical Adeptness
- Dickinson’s Summer: “I know a place where Summer strives”
- “A Bird came down the Walk”: Dickinson’s Frightened Beads
- Dickinson’s Spiritual Intoxication: “I taste a liquor never brewed”
- Dickinson’s Riddles: “It sifts from leaden sieves” and “I like to see it lap the miles”
- Looking Back from Eternity: Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death”
- The Nun of Amherst: Dickinson’s Spiritual Poetry
- Emily's Brain: Dickinson’s “The Brain is wider than the Sky”
