mashed the air
Dickinson's violent verb choice—not 'swept' or 'shook' but **mashed**, like crushing potatoes. The storm physically pulverizes the atmosphere.
creatures chuckled
The storm becomes demons or goblins—**creatures** with fists, teeth, and hair. This isn't meteorology; it's a monster movie.
his native coast
The storm gets a gender and a home. **His** makes it a wandering male entity returning east (storms in New England move west to east).
Reading Notes
Dickinson's Storm Monster
Dickinson transforms a thunderstorm into a living demon with fists, teeth, and frenzied hair. The word creatures (plural) suggests multiple entities—imps or goblins riding the wind, chuckling with malicious glee. This is Gothic horror vocabulary, not nature poetry.
The personification escalates through the poem. First the storm mashes the air (violent but abstract), then creatures appear with body parts, finally consolidating into a single monster with faded eyes. By the end, it's one coherent being retreating home—his native coast—like a defeated villain.
Spectre's cloak in stanza one telegraphs the ghost-story mode. The storm doesn't just darken the sky; it wears death's costume. When it lifts, the return to normal isn't just calm weather—it's Paradise, the opposite of this demonic visitation.
The Physics of Fading
The monster's faded eyes is the poem's strangest image. Eyes don't fade during a storm—but lightning does. Dickinson may be describing the weakening flashes as the storm moves away, reimagined as a creature's dimming vision.
Turned slowly to his native coast captures how storms dissipate: the gradual eastward movement as the system exhausts itself. New England storms typically travel east toward the Atlantic. Dickinson gives this meteorological fact a narrative—the monster going home, defeated by morning light.
The poem's structure mirrors the storm's arc: violent compression in the middle stanza (four aggressive verbs in two lines), then the quick resolution of the final stanza. The morning lit is just three words, but it banishes eight lines of chaos instantly.