“There came a Wind like a Bugle” by Emily Dickinson: Close Reading Anonymous College

Nature in its many facets is a frequent topic of Dickinson’s poems, and she often chooses one or two specific elements to closely describe in her unique voice. In closely examining a specific item or instance, she often tries to see it from an unconventional perspective or glean a hidden truth. In “There came a Wind like a Bugle,” Dickinson lends her talents to depicting a thunderstorm’s arrival. She uses odd rhyme schemes, unusual diction and catachresis, and ambiguity to communicate the wildness, danger, destruction, and finally awe and wonder associated with a storm.

The rhyme scheme is imperfect, as the norm for Dickinson. As usual, she employs slant rhyme – the use of similar, but not identical word endings to simulate a rhyme pattern without exactly rhyming. However even beyond the slant rhyme, the pattern is extremely unusual. She rhymes the second line with the fourth, the sixth with the eighth, the tenth with the twelfth, and the thirteenth with the fourteenth and the seventeenth. Perhaps this irregularity is a representation of the wildness of the storm, the rapidity with which it passes, or the wildness and “flying tidings” referred to in the second half.

Dickinson has a talent for unusual but strangely accurate...