Emily Dickinson

Gossip

THE leaves, like women, interchange

Sagacious confidence

**Sagacious** means wise or shrewd—Dickinson's making gossip sound like serious intelligence work, not idle chatter.

Sagacious confidence;
Somewhat of nods, and somewhat of
Portentous inference,

Portentous inference

**Portentous** means ominous or prophetic. The gossipers think they're reading important signs, making dramatic deductions from small clues.

The parties in both cases

Enjoining secrecy

**Enjoin** means to command or urge strongly—both leaves and women insist on confidentiality even as they spread information.

Enjoining secrecy,—
Inviolable compact

Inviolable compact / To notoriety

The paradox lands here: an **inviolable** (unbreakable) promise of secrecy that leads directly **to notoriety** (public knowledge). The secret-keeping is the spreading.

To notoriety.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Gossip Paradox

The poem's structure mirrors its subject: it appears to be about leaves, then reveals it's really about women, then suggests both operate by the same rules. Dickinson uses "like women" in line 1, making leaves the metaphor's vehicle—but by stanza 2, she's talking about "parties in both cases," treating natural and social worlds as parallel systems of information exchange.

The final paradox is the point: an "Inviolable compact / To notoriety." The promise of secrecy is what enables the spread of gossip. You can only share a secret if you frame it as confidential—"don't tell anyone, but..." The compact (agreement) is inviolable (sacred, unbreakable) precisely because it guarantees notoriety (fame, public knowledge). The secret-keeping is the mechanism of distribution.

Dickinson wrote this around 1876, during her most reclusive period in Amherst. She rarely left her house but maintained intense correspondence—letters were her form of controlled information exchange. The poem treats gossip as a system with its own logic, not as a moral failing. Notice she doesn't condemn it; she anatomizes it.

Elevated Diction

Dickinson uses deliberately fancy vocabulary—sagacious, portentous, enjoining, inviolable, compact—to describe something trivial. This is the joke. She's writing about gossip in the language of diplomacy, espionage, and sacred vows.

"Portentous inference" is particularly funny: the gossipers think they're prophets interpreting signs, drawing weighty conclusions from "somewhat of nods." That "somewhat" (repeated twice) undercuts the grandeur—these are vague gestures, not evidence, but they're treated as significant intelligence.

The high-low contrast is the poem's engine: cosmic language for petty behavior, which either mocks gossip or suggests Dickinson sees real complexity in how information moves through social networks. Given her own careful management of her poems and letters, probably both.