Emily Dickinson

Disenchantment

DISENCHANTMENT.
IT dropped so low in my regard

Physical fall metaphor

The abstract concept of disillusionment becomes a literal object dropping and shattering. Dickinson makes the mental process audible and visible.

I heard it hit the ground,
And go to pieces on the stones
At bottom of my mind;

Geological mind

The mind has a **bottom** with **stones**—a foundation where things break permanently. Not soft disappointment, but hard fracture.

Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less
Than I reviled myself

Plated vs. silver

**Plated wares** are cheap metal coated with a thin layer of silver—fake luxury. She's angrier at herself for mistaking the fake for the real than at the fake thing itself.

For entertaining plated wares
Upon my silver shelf.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Economics of Disappointment

Dickinson frames disillusionment as a quality control failure. The poem's final metaphor—plated wares on a silver shelf—comes from Victorian household management, where middle-class families displayed their wealth through tableware. Plated items were base metal electroplated with silver, a cheaper alternative that would eventually tarnish and reveal the fraud underneath.

The anger isn't directed at the counterfeit object but at her own judgment. She "reviled myself" more than she "blamed the fate"—the self-disgust outweighs the disappointment. This is the emotional math of someone who prides themselves on discernment. Being fooled is worse than being disappointed.

Notice the progression: something falls, hits, shatters into pieces on stones. The violence escalates. By the time we reach "plated wares," we understand this isn't about a minor letdown—this is about discovering you've been displaying a fake on your shelf of genuine things, that you entertained (gave house-room to, took seriously) something worthless.

Dickinson's Shattering Syntax

The poem's structure mirrors its content—everything fractures. Look at the sentence breaks: "It dropped so low in my regard / I heard it hit the ground" splits the falling action across lines. The enjambment makes you experience the drop.

"Yet blamed the fate that fractured, less / Than I reviled myself"—this is classic Dickinson syntactic difficulty. You have to hold "blamed...less than" in your head while processing the interruption. The comparison itself is fractured, making you work to reassemble it. She could have written "I blamed myself more than fate," but instead she makes the grammar as broken as the subject matter.

The final image—"entertaining plated wares / Upon my silver shelf"—uses entertaining in its older sense of "receiving as a guest" or "keeping in mind." She gave this fraudulent thing a place of honor. The metaphor does double duty: it's both about household objects and about ideas or people she valued that turned out to be fake.