Emily Dickinson

The brain within its groove

Summary


"The Brain Within Its Groove" is a short poem by Emily Dickinson that pictures the mind running smoothly along a familiar track. Then a single splinter swerves it off course. Dickinson sets that small disruption beside a flood that carves new channels through the hills and wipes out the mills below. The mood is tense and quietly unsettling, and the stakes feel enormous. In only eight lines, you can read how fragile steady thought can be once it is knocked loose.

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THE brain within its groove
Runs evenly and true;
But let a splinter swerve,
‘T were easier for you
To put the water back
When floods have slit the hills,
And scooped a turnpike for themselves,
And blotted out the mills!

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Credits

Emily Dickinson was a 19th-century American poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, famed for her compact, startling verse and her distinctive dashes. Much of her work was published only after her death, and this poem shows her habit of explaining the inner mind through bold, concrete images of nature and landscape.