If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking

Dickinson’s “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking” is often quoted as an example of selfless service and devotion, but evidence points to another interpretation. If Dickinson had meant to compose a poem about sacrifice, her precise attention to syntax and diction would have created a different conditional set of circumstances, and the poem may have read, “If I can stop all hearts from breaking,” or more emphatically, “If I can’t stop all hearts from breaking, I will have lived in vain.” Other poems demonstrate Dickinson’s remove; in “I Measure Every Grief I Meet,” Dickinson honors the suffering of others as a witness only. In that poem, Dickinson connects individual human suffering to Christ’s sacrifice, wondering also if some of the grief she sees in strangers mirrors her own. Dickinson’s “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” may seem like the inverse of “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking,” but the theme is similar. In that poem, the soul of an individual is described as “unmoved,” but not isolated; it has closed “the Valves of her attention” after choosing one person as the object of affection.