While she clearly sees the warship on the sea, she also sees the mermaids at the bottom of the seafloor. The juxtaposition of the realistic and the mystical offers insight into the speaker’s feelings and thoughts. The description of a warship suggests that the speaker is aware of the mystical and tranquil parts of her life, such as the sea and the mermaids, but she is also aware of reality, such as war.

A “frigate” is a type of warship often used in the U.S Navy. With this stanza, the speaker combines the mystical with the realistic when she describes the “frigates- in the upper floor”. This reveals the speaker’s desire to be admired. The speaker feels worthy of being looked at. This foreshadows what the rest of ‘I Started Early – Took my Dog’ will imply. She presents the idea that she is being watched by the mermaids as if she is an object of fascination to them. The reader immediately gets the sense of the mystical and tranquil all in one short description of the speaker’s walk by the sea. She creates the mystical factor of the setting when she introduces “the mermaids in the basement” that swam up to look at her. The reader can imagine an early morning walk by the ocean. With the opening stanza, the speaker provides a calm, yet mystical setting. I Started Early – Took my Dog Analysis Stanza One I started Early – Took my Dog – Emily Dickinson Although she had intense desires to know and be known, her fear trumped those desires, and though she was able to express her desires through this poem, her readers may never know whether she was able to fulfill these desires in reality. The author was afraid of being known, and she was afraid of knowing others. This reveals a lot about the author and her fear of being close to people. In this way, she believes that she can see the outcome of such an encounter without an actual sexual encounter with a man. For this reason, the speaker uses the Sea to personify a man fulfilling her sexual desires. This speaker, however, much like the author, seems to have a fear of fulfilling those desires.

Though she was clearly a very deep and philosophical human being, she also experienced the physical desires that every human encounters. Thus, ‘I Started Early – Took my Dog’ seems to reach into the depths of the author that she rarely expressed herself. Most who have read with whom she corresponded regularly, but she very rarely came into physical contact with anything. ‘ I Started Early – Took my Dog’ is probably known for Dickinson’s solitude almost as much as she is known for the poems she has written.

Started early took my dog