ABSTRACT
The source for Emily Dickinson’s poem is the Player’s soliloquy in Hamlet, which describes the hesitation Pyrrhus feels before killing Priam and his successful act of regicide. The speech epitomizes what the Romantics—and many others too—admire in William Shakespeare, which is his masterful creation of dramatic scenes that portray universal psychological states. Shakespeare describes a man about to commit regicide; Dickinson uses that image as a metaphor for a reader’s experience of the poetic sublime. The poem is a variation upon the Shakespearean sonnet, and as in that tradition, the couplet succinctly sums up the meaning of the poem as a whole. The Player’s soliloquy narrates the slaying of a king, and that slaying is a good image of what Shakespeare does to his auditors. Dickinson’s emotional response to the Player’s speech flowered into 477 in response both to focuses on its patterns of images and its prosody.
