Solve a mystery and you lose it. That is the slightly uncomfortable claim Dickinson packs into the opening lines of "How Human Nature dotes." We are drawn, she says, to whatever we cannot detect, and the instant a "Plot is plumbed" the thing we were really enjoying, "Prospective," the sense of something still ahead of us, is "extinct." The poem then widens from a remark about curiosity into a question about the largest unknown there is, and it ends without answering it.
Her word choices do most of the work. "Dotes" is not a neutral verb. It suggests fond, slightly foolish affection, the way someone dotes on a grandchild, so human nature comes across as besotted with the hidden. "Detect" brings in the vocabulary of investigation, and "plumbed" follows it. A plumb line is a weight dropped on a cord to measure depth, so to plumb a Plot is to find its bottom. "Plot" is pleasingly slippery too: a story's plot, a conspiracy, a patch of ground. Each sense fits the idea of something being fathomed and finished. The hard p sounds of "Plot," "plumbed" and "Prospective" pile up in line three, which feels like a weight hitting the floor of the sea.
The second stanza is harder, and it is worth admitting that. Dickinson repeats "Prospective" from the previous line, linking the stanzas like a chain, but the meaning flips. What was extinct becomes "the friend / Reserved for us to know." When? "When Constancy is clarified / Of Curiosity." Constancy suggests steadiness or faithfulness, and "clarified" suggests a liquid strained of its impurities. My reading is that a time comes when steadfastness is purified of the restless itch to know. The grammar allows other readings, but the shift from loss to promise seems clear. The sound adds something. "Constancy," "clarified" and "Curiosity" crowd three c-words together, as if the two qualities cannot quite be separated even in the sentence that separates them.
The last stanza names the target. Of all the subjects that "resist" our probing, "Redoubtablest is this." The word is gloriously clumsy, a formidable adjective stretched into a superlative, so that the sentence itself seems to strain. "This" is never defined, but the closing question, "Where go we -- / Go we anywhere / Creation after this?", points toward whatever lies beyond the world we know. The syntax loosens as it asks. "Where go we" stops at a dash. The inverted "Go we anywhere," with no helping "do," sounds old-fashioned and almost prayerful. The last line is a fragment that borrows its verb from the line before. "This" also closes both "Redoubtablest is this" and the whole poem, bracketing the stanza with the very thing that cannot be pinned down.
The form supports the argument. The lines are short, mostly three or four beats with an iambic lilt ("How HU-man NA-ture DOTES"), and the rhymes are faint. "Detect" and "extinct" chime only on their closing consonants, and the second stanza barely rhymes at all. A tidy rhyme scheme would feel like a plot plumbed, everything resolved and put away. Dickinson's characteristic dashes and capitalised nouns, "Plot," "Constancy," "Curiosity," "Creation," make each abstraction seem like a character in a small drama.
The poem is significant because it turns a witty observation into a paradox. If the final question could ever be answered, it would kill the very prospect it raises. Because it resists, the prospect stays alive, and so does our doting. The poem seems to hint at this without saying it outright, and it leaves its reader holding a question rather than a conclusion.