frigate like a book
A frigate is a fast warship—the 19th century's speed machine. Dickinson picks the most dramatic comparison possible for something you hold in your hand.
coursers like a page
Coursers are war horses bred for speed. She's stacking military metaphors—ships, horses, chariots—for the act of reading.
oppress of toll
Toll roads and turnpikes charged by the mile in her era. This isn't metaphorical—books literally were the only free travel for the poor.
Reading Notes
Why Military Vehicles?
Dickinson lived in Amherst, Massachusetts her entire life, rarely leaving her father's house after age 30. She never saw a frigate. She's writing about imagined travel, which is the point.
The escalation matters: frigate (naval warfare), coursers (cavalry), chariot (ancient conquest). Each vehicle is military, elite, expensive. She's comparing reading to the transportation of emperors and generals. The contrast with "the poorest take" is deliberate—she's democratizing conquest.
Prancing poetry does double work. Prancing describes how horses move, but also how poetry sounds—metrical, rhythmic, showy. The alliteration itself prances. She's making the form demonstrate the content.
The Economics of Reading
CONTEXT In 1873, when this was published, a train ticket from Amherst to Boston cost about a day's wages for a laborer. Books from lending libraries were free.
The final couplet shifts from speed to cost. Frugal is an unusual word choice—not "cheap" or "free," but economical, efficient. The question "How frugal is the chariot" reads almost like bookkeeping. She's literally calculating the cost-per-mile of transporting a soul.
Human soul is the only abstract phrase in a poem otherwise full of physical objects (ships, horses, pages, tolls). She saves it for the last word. The poem argues that reading isn't escapism—it's the actual movement of the self. The soul travels; the body stays home.