instant's width
Dickinson measures time spatially—the open door creates a sliver of warmth you can walk through. Duration becomes geometry.
I, lost, was passing by
Repeated verbatim from line 2. The repetition traps you in the same moment—nothing has changed except the speaker's awareness.
Lost doubly
The math of the poem: lost once by circumstance, lost twice by seeing what she's missing. Contrast multiplies deprivation.
Reading Notes
The Economics of a Glimpse
The poem operates on contrast as arithmetic. Line 1 gives you a door. Line 6 gives you the same door, same speaker, same situation—but now the speaker counts herself >"Lost doubly."< The glimpse of domestic comfort (warmth, wealth, company) doesn't comfort; it quantifies deprivation.
Dickinson uses economic language throughout: "wealth," "disclosed" (a financial term for revealing assets), and the final phrase "Enlightening misery" which plays on Enlightenment rationalism. To enlighten usually means to educate or free from ignorance. Here it means the opposite—clarity makes suffering worse. You can't miss what you can't see.
The repetition of "I, lost, was passing by" (lines 2 and 6) is the structural hinge. Same words, different meaning. First time: simple statement of being lost. Second time: the word "lost" now carries the weight of contrast. The door opened and shut >"as sudden"< (line 5)—Dickinson's compression of "as suddenly"—emphasizing speed. The experience is over before it begins, but its effect is permanent.
Dickinson's Outsider Geometry
Dickinson rarely left her Amherst home after age 30, watching life from windows. This poem reads like her architectural theology—salvation as a door that opens for others. The "instant's width" is classic Dickinson measurement: she spatializes time (width), temporalizes space (instant), making the metaphysical concrete.
The poem's ABCB rhyme (by/by, disclosed/most) feels off-balance because lines 3-4 don't rhyme internally—the form itself enacts asymmetry, the mismatch between inside and outside. Notice "company" in line 4: not just people, but the commercial term for a firm, an enterprise. What's inside the door is both domestic and economic, both fellowship and capital.
"Enlightening misery" is the poem's intellectual punch. It inverts Plato's cave allegory—seeing the light doesn't free you, it shows you the bars. This is Dickinson's Calvinist inheritance: knowledge of grace without access to it. The poem asks whether ignorance might be mercy.