wrecked men deem
"Deem" means "judge" or "believe"—not "see." The hallucination happens in the mind, not the eyes.
struggle slacker
They ease their effort, thinking rescue is near. The false hope is literally fatal—they stop swimming too soon.
fictitious shores
"Fictitious" means invented, made-up. These aren't mirages—they're mental fabrications. The drowning man creates his own false hope.
Reading Notes
The Shipwreck as Psychological Map
Dickinson uses shipwreck not as metaphor but as parallel case study. She's not saying "peace is like land to a drowning man"—she's saying "I do exactly what wrecked men do." The poem's logic: wrecked men hallucinate land, ease their struggle, and drown. I hallucinate peace, ease my struggle (spiritual? emotional?), and suffer the same fate. The "as I" in line 6 makes this explicit—she's comparing methods, not feelings.
The "fictitious shores" are the poem's crux. These aren't real islands mistaken for harbors—they're shores that exist only in the mind. The drowning man invents them, believes in them, acts on them. Dickinson confesses to the same self-deception: "I many times thought peace had come." Not "seemed to come" or "appeared"—thought. The error is cognitive, repeated ("many times"), and apparently ineradicable.
"Struggle slacker" does double work. Literally: the swimmer stops fighting the water, thinking he's saved. Psychologically: Dickinson stops whatever spiritual or emotional effort she's been making. The false peace is dangerous precisely because it feels like permission to stop. The poem ends before the harbor—we're left "at centre of the sea" with an unknown number of false shores still ahead. No rescue, no arrival, just the arithmetic of self-deception: how many more times will she mistake exhaustion for peace?
Dickinson's Grammar of Certainty
Watch Dickinson's verb choices. "Deem they sight"—not "see" but "deem they sight." The wrecked men don't see land; they judge that they see it. The hallucination happens in the act of interpretation, not perception. Same with "thought peace had come"—the past perfect tense ("had come") suggests peace arrived before she noticed it, was already present. But it wasn't. The grammar itself enacts the error.
The poem's syntax gets knotty at the turn: "And struggle slacker, but to prove, / As hopelessly as I, / How many the fictitious shores." Unpack it: [They] struggle slacker, but [this slackening] proves how many fictitious shores lie before the harbor—and proves it "as hopelessly as I" [prove the same thing]. She's not watching their shipwreck from shore. She's in the water with them, running the same doomed experiment: believe rescue is near, ease the struggle, discover you were wrong, repeat.