Delve into a world constructed from images and thoughts streaming along at the speed of light. Watch them flow as they for buildings, people, animals and objects. Streaming along at the speed of light, one can only catch glimpses of what is truly concealed within by the river. As it travels through the mind, it touches everything.
Forming, altering, defining, nothing is truly what it seems or what we interpret it to be. Hidden within the stream lies powers that are truly incomprehensible to the human mind. In “Your thoughts don’t have words… .” Emily Dickinson intertwines this realization within the constructs of her poem. Dickinson explores the complex world of the mind through her poem. She delves into the realization that what we know and what flows though are minds are truly two different things and that these two things are as different as night and day.
In the first two lines “Your thoughts don’t have words every day, they come a single time” can be best put into an analogy. One’s thoughts come streaming into one’s mind, flooding and saturating ones thoughts. Because one’s thoughts come pouring in without any restraint, the mind must maintain itself in the only way it seems possible. Thus, our thoughts speak with words, sentences, images that we can comprehend and understand. The next two lines, lines three and four, further solidify this interpretation. “Like signal esoteric sips of the Communion Wine…
.” communicates the idea that what we are able to think and comprehend is only a fraction what truly flows through our minds. As fast as we can interpret our thoughts, thousands more stream by without us even realizing it. As the lines state, the thoughts that we interpret are as occasional as when we sip the Communion Wine, coming to us only once every so often because we are always preoccupied with so many other things. However, despite the fact that we only realize a tiny fraction of the thoughts that comes to us, they are truly as precious as the Communion Wine. Lines five and six bring the realization that all that is our thoughts are just the ideas and concepts that we are familiar with.
Thus, making it easier for our minds to interpret the concepts with greater ease. “Which while you taste so native seems so easy so to be… .” reiterates this concept. The lines are saying that the thoughts that we interpret are familiar, or native, to us and that is why they are so easy to comprehend. This realization, however, brings to light a rather disturbing fact in that if out thoughts are really only those that we are familiar with, then thousands of ideas and revelations pass through our minds, untouched because we are unable to comprehend what relevance they truly have or what importance they contain within them. Such a concept also establishes why those that we would deem intelligent are so because they are capable of interpreting more of there thoughts than we would normally disregard as nonsense.
In the final two lines of Dickinson’s poem, the entire poem is summed up and brought to a close with the idea that we do not even realize that we are only experiencing a fraction of the thoughts and emotions that flow through out minds. “You cannot comprehend its price nor it’s frequency,” states a profound revelation that Dickinson has. And that revelation is that our thoughts are more precious than we know. They define us and allow us to interpret our world to suit out needs and desires.
Out thoughts are our own no matter what anyone says. Furthermore, we do not even realize that we are only experiencing a fraction of what truly goes through our heads. Instead, we believe everything that we are able to interpret is all that goes through our head. The human mind only utilizes ten percent of its true capacity.
Dickinson’s poem seems to center around this notion and the idea that because of this we see the world as we would like it to be and in ways that we are familiar with. Which leaves the question then, what is the world truly like? If everyone interprets the world in different ways, then the concept of an idea world differs from one person to another because everyone defines the world in different ways. Also, the meanings of life and love are left open to interpretation because our minds defines them as different meanings than everyone else.