Emily Dickinson

Experience

EXPERIENCE.

plank to plank

Makeshift bridge or dock—unstable, temporary footing. Not a solid path but disconnected pieces you have to navigate between.

I STEPPED from plank to plank
So slow and cautiously;
The stars about my head I felt,

stars / sea

Cosmic scale—she's suspended between heaven and ocean, the two infinities. This isn't a casual walk.

stars / sea

Cosmic scale—she's suspended between heaven and ocean, the two infinities. This isn't a casual walk.

About my feet the sea.
I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch,—
This gave me that precarious gait

precarious gait

The careful, unsteady walk of someone who's learned to expect danger. **Gait** = manner of walking, shaped by past near-misses.

Some call experience.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Physics of Learning

Dickinson defines experience not as accumulated knowledge but as permanent physical alteration. The poem's final move is crucial: experience isn't what you know, it's how you walk. That "precarious gait" is involuntary—your body remembers danger even when your mind might forget.

The planks create a specific geometry of risk. Each step could be "my final inch," which makes the present tense continuous threat. She's not describing one past event but the ongoing condition of moving through the world after you've learned it can collapse under you.

CONTEXT Dickinson wrote this around 1864, during the Civil War's bloodiest years. She'd also experienced multiple deaths in her social circle and her own health crises. The poem reads like trauma mechanics: how near-death changes your relationship to ordinary movement.

What "Some Call"

That dismissive final phrase—"Some call experience"—does quiet work. Some means "other people," which splits the speaker from those who use the word casually. They call it experience; she knows it as altered gait, as body memory, as permanent wariness.

The poem's compression matters. Eight lines to redefine a major abstraction. Dickinson takes a word people throw around—"gaining experience," "learning from experience"—and shows the physical cost. Experience isn't wisdom you acquire. It's damage you carry in how you move.