Dickinson compared being forced into prose to locking a bird in the pound
As a girl, Emily Dickinson's speaker was shut in a closet because the adults wanted her quiet. Grown up, she finds the same people trying to confine her to prose. Her reply is gleeful defiance: jailing her mind is as pointless as arresting a bird for treason, since it can simply fly off, laughing.
The poem begins with two kinds of confinement laid side by side. "They shut me up in Prose", the speaker says, and compares it to childhood punishments in a closet, imposed because the grown-ups liked her still. The unnamed 'they' could be family, teachers or polite society; what matters is that ordinary, sensible language is treated as a cupboard with the door locked.
Then comes a pun that turns the poem around. The second stanza seizes the word 'still' and throws it back with an exclamation mark. Had those jailers peeped inside, they would have seen her brain spinning, anything but motionless. Locking her up, she says, was as sensible as putting a bird in the pound for treason: a solemn penalty applied to a creature it cannot hold.
The final stanza belongs to the bird. It needs only to will its freedom and, as easily as a star, it abolishes its captivity and laughs. The last words, "No more have I", apply the same rule to the speaker. Poetry is her flight: her imagination never really accepted the restraint, so the closet and the prose alike were empty gestures.
Her real upbringing was anything but intellectually cramped. Her primary schooling, in a two-storey building on Pleasant Street, was described as ambitiously classical for a Victorian girl, and her father checked on his children's progress even from business trips. From 1840 she spent seven years at Amherst Academy, studying Latin, botany, geology, history, arithmetic and 'mental philosophy'. Principal Daniel Taggart Fiske remembered her as very bright and an excellent scholar.
Source: They shut me up in Prose --
