How Human Nature dotes — Summary

We’re hopelessly drawn to what we can’t figure out. Emily Dickinson pins this down with wry precision: the moment a plot is fully understood, all sense of “prospective” — that delicious feeling of something still to come — vanishes. She calls prospective a friend, one we only get to keep while curiosity remains unsettled and no final constancy has been reached. The poem’s mood starts off knowingly amused, almost gossipy about our faults. But then it shifts. In the last lines, Dickinson asks a question that opens a huge, uneasy silence: once we’ve exhausted all the mysteries of creation, where do we go? There’s a chill in that, a sudden awareness that our endless probing might leave us with nothing left to wonder at. The speaker’s tone becomes hushed, a little haunted, as if the real terror isn’t the unknown, but the day we have no unknowns left.