If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking

The sense of wonder Dickinson conveys when observing nature and natural phenomena comes from her Calvinist upbringing. Calvinist teaching urged followers to find an individual relationship with God through the word—the text of the Bible—and through almost mystic communion with nature. Dickinson’s Amherst education would have given her a solid scientific background; she took great delight in gardening and annotating her herbarium. But Amherst’s curriculum would have instructed Dickinson that scientific observation was a means to glimpse the face of the divine. In poems like “If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking,” Dickinson’s reverence for nature is clear, as the robin’s suffering has as much intrinsic value as any. For Dickinson, any part of nature represents the entirety of nature, and, in a kind of spiritual metonymy, represents the presence of God in all.

Imagery of spheres and circumference in Dickinson’s poetry embody her vision of God as an emanating presence throughout the physical and natural world. The magnitude of stopping one heart from breaking, as the poem asserts, becomes larger as the gesture travels outward from the giver—sort of like the more contemporary concept of the Butterfly Effect whereby the smallest actions can ripple out in large ways. The smallest mercies amplify—especially when applied in nature. Even as the dogma of Puritanism began to fade, the transcendent relationship Calvinists were encouraged to have with nature survives in a more secular form.