Emily Dickinson

Tis opposites entice,

Entice vs. Possess

**Entice** means to attract or tempt—not to satisfy. The whole poem is about wanting what you don't have, not getting it.

'TIS opposites entice,
Deformed men ponder grace,
Bright fires, the blanketless—
The lost, Day's face.
The blind esteem it be
Enough estate to see;

Estate = Wealth

To the blind, sight would be **estate**—property, inheritance, wealth. One sense worth a fortune.

Strangles New

The captive **strangles new**—suffers fresh agony—watching free beggars **play**. Freedom looks like leisure from a cell.

The captive strangles new
For deeming beggars play.
To lack enamour Thee,

Lack = Love

**Enamour** means to cause to fall in love. Your lack—your absence—makes me love you. Desire feeds on distance.

Tho' the Divinity

Divinity Be Me

The god you worship is **only / Me**—the speaker herself. The line break isolates **Me**, making it both humble and enormous.

Be only
Me.

Divinity Be Me

The god you worship is **only / Me**—the speaker herself. The line break isolates **Me**, making it both humble and enormous.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Economics of Desire

Dickinson builds this poem on lack as the engine of longing. Each example shows someone obsessed with what they don't have: deformed men think about beauty (grace), freezing people dream of fire, the lost imagine daylight, the blind value sight as estate (property, inheritance). The pattern is relentless—desire exists only in the gap between having and wanting.

The word entice (not "satisfy" or "fulfill") is crucial. Opposites attract us, tempt us, but the poem never suggests we get what we want. The blind esteem sight, the captive strangles new watching beggars play—these are ongoing states of wanting, not resolutions. The poem is about the ache, not the cure.

The final stanza turns personal and shocking. "To lack enamour Thee"—your absence makes me love you. Then the kicker: "Tho' the Divinity / Be only / Me." The god being worshipped is the speaker herself. That line break isolating Me does double work—it's both self-effacing ("only me, nothing special") and self-deifying ("ME, alone, divine"). The beloved wants someone absent; the speaker is present and therefore unwanted. She's the fire to someone else's blanketless wanderer, the daylight to their lost traveler—but presence kills desire.

Dickinson's Compression

Notice how much Dickinson packs into fragments. "Bright fires, the blanketless—" is not a complete sentence, just two nouns smashed together. The dash does the work: the blanketless person fixates on bright fires. She could write "The blanketless dream of bright fires" but instead gives us the collision—fires, blanketless—and makes us do the connecting.

"The captive strangles new / For deeming beggars play" is syntactically weird. Strangles new = suffers fresh strangulation. For deeming = because he thinks. Beggars play = free beggars play around. The captive chokes on his own perception—watching free people (even poor ones) who can play while he cannot. The line order scrambles normal English but creates a strangling effect in the reading itself.

The poem's repetition—it literally repeats the entire first two stanzas—reinforces the obsessive circling of desire. We loop back through the same examples because this is how longing works: repetitive, circular, unable to escape its own logic.