Emily Dickinson

A dew sufficed itself

Reflexive grammar trick

"Sufficed itself"—grammatically weird. Dewdrops don't normally take reflexive verbs. Dickinson makes the dew self-contained, needing nothing external.

A DEW sufficed itself
And satisfied a leaf,
And felt, 'how vast a destiny!
How trivial is life!'

Scale reversal

The dew thinks it's accomplished something huge ("vast destiny") while dismissing actual life as trivial. Dickinson loves this kind of perspective flip.

Personification shift

Sun goes to "work," day goes to "play"—notice the sun gets the labor while the abstract "day" gets leisure. She's splitting the 24-hour cycle into competing characters.

The sun went out to work,
The day went out to play,
But not again that dew was seen
By physiognomy.

Medical term

**Physiognomy** = the art of reading faces/appearances. The dew wasn't seen by anyone who could identify it—it vanished without witness.

Whether by day abducted,
Or emptied by the sun
Into the sea, in passing,
Eternally unknown.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Dew's Delusion

Dickinson opens with a dew drop having an existential crisis. The reflexive verb "sufficed itself" is grammatically odd—we'd say "the dew sufficed" or "satisfied the leaf." By making it reflexive, she gives the droplet self-awareness and autonomy. It's complete unto itself, needing nothing.

Then comes the comedy: this tiny, temporary thing feels it has achieved a "vast destiny" by wetting one leaf. The exclamation points in stanza two are doing heavy lifting—they could be sincere wonder or Dickinson's irony. The dew dismisses "life" as trivial, apparently unaware that it IS life, and about to evaporate.

This is classic Dickinson scale manipulation. She frequently takes the smallest things (flies, stones, dewdrops) and grants them cosmic significance, or reverses the trick—making eternity feel domestic. Here the joke is that the dew's "vast destiny" lasts maybe two hours before the sun burns it off.

Three Theories of Disappearance

The final stanza offers three explanations for where the dew went: abducted by day, emptied by the sun into the sea, or something else "eternally unknown." Notice she doesn't pick one. The uncertainty is the point.

Dickinson wrote this around 1858-1862, during her most productive period, when she was also writing obsessively about death and disappearance. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, most unpublished in her lifetime—she knew something about vanishing without witness. The phrase "not again that dew was seen / By physiognomy" emphasizes that no one was looking. No human eye tracked its fate.

The "passing" in line 11 does double duty—the sun passes by, but also the dew passes away. Dickinson rarely uses words accidentally. The final word, "unknown," gets its own line and maximum emphasis. Whether this is about a dewdrop, a life, or a soul, the poem ends in mystery, not resolution.