Emily Dickinson and the Music: that keyless Rhyme in Better – than Music!

Dickinson's "Better-than Music!" (F378) expresses the poet's declaration of independence and claims that her poems were "faint Rehearsals" for the song of Moses and the Lamb of Revelation.Dickinson locates herself in the prophetic tradition in the Bible: she could be ranked with Mosses and Jesus Christ.By ending the poem with a full rhyme, the poet attempts to create the very moment when earthly humming turns into celestial music through the use of "that keyless Rhyme."Focusing on her use of a full rhyme in the nal stanza, I argue that the rhyme pair "alone" and "Throne" strongly implicates her ambition to bring together the earth and heaven.Emily Dickinson's poems are well-known to be characterized by irregular meters and partial rhymes.However, the fact that they also contain some regular meters and pure full rhymes has not been made equally clear.She is famous for having been a highly ingenious inventor of partial rhymes, while little attention has been paid to her deliberate use of full rhymes and their poetic effect.William Harmon and Judy Small (1987, 1990) brie y mention that Dickinson's peculiar use of a full rhyme at the end of a poem may signify the poet's intention of creating a solid foundation of a poem, although they extensively discuss the poetic effect of partial rhymes in her poems.This stable rhyme pattern appears in approximately 15% of her poems from 1862 to 1864.Timothy Morris's (1988) detailed analysis of the frequency of full rhymes in Dickinson's poems support the present study author's point.The frequency of full rhymes in Dickinson's early 1860s steadily decreases.The best way to enduringly impress the reader could be through the arrangement of sounds.Dickinson pays particular attention to the last word of the last stanza because it lingers longest in the reader's ears.In particular, in a setting marked by de cient rhymes, a full rhyme at the end of a poem has a great impact on the reader.The last rhyme pair in a poem is the most important, because it represents the culmination of her vision.Since Dickinson was an end-focused poet, end-rhymes surely play a great role in the poetic