If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking

Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems are composed in hymnal stanza, or common meter: cross-rhymed quatrains alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines. So many of her poems follow this form that it’s noteworthy when one of her poems does not. The first three lines of “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking” seem to indicate another poem in hymnal stanza, but the fourth line drops a foot from its predicted trimeter. The next line is also a foot short, followed by a full trimeter line, then the final, repeated second line, is also trimeter. The result is a kind of diminished hymn that trails off before it gets started. It’s as if the speaker notices the halting uncertainty of her meter and ends the poem early with an assuring restatement. But in a poem about the power of a very small gesture, the unfinished lines mean more in absence and suggestion than would further ornamentation.

The rhyme pattern mostly follows an alternating abababb pattern, close to Dickinson’s typical form. The “robin” (Line 5) is a faint echo of the unaccented syllables in “breaking” (Line 2) and “aching” (Line 4); it’s about as far stretched as rhyme can be and still be called a possible rhyme.