Few poems ask "Am I still me?" with so little fuss. Dickinson's speaker announces no crisis. She simply starts checking, the way you pat your pockets for lost keys. "I felt my life with both my hands / To see if it was there": the verb is physical, almost comic, and the two hands suggest how thorough and how anxious the search is. Something has happened to her, and the poem never says what. All we know is that she can no longer take her own existence for granted.
The tests that follow grow stranger and more touching. She holds her spirit "to the Glass," whether mirror or lens, "to prove it possibler." The word looks like Dickinson's own coinage, and its comparative form is what makes it clever. Existence becomes a matter of degree, and the speaker is hoping only to be a little more possible than before. Next she turns her Being "round and round" like a parcel in her hands and pauses "at every pound / To ask the Owner's name." "Pound" is slippery. Given the body imagery, it may mean a pulse or heartbeat. It also carries a sense of weight and money, so the self starts to sound like lost property whose owner can't be identified. The joke has a dark edge, because the person who ought to answer is the one asking. Her doubt is whether she would even recognise "the Sound" of her own name.
In the third stanza the search moves to her face, and the verbs turn rough: she "judged" her features, "jarred" her hair, "pushed" her dimples. It is like shaking a toy to see if it still works. She then waits for the dimples to "twinkle back," as though her face were a separate creature that might answer her. The grammar gives way here too. "Conviction might, of me --" never reaches a verb or an ending, so the sentence is as unconvinced as the speaker.
The form carries this unease. The lines alternate between about eight syllables and about six, a hymn-like, ballad-like measure with a steady, singsong pulse. Against that calm, the rhymes keep slipping. "There" and "possibler" share little beyond a trailing *r* sound, and "name" and "Sound" barely touch. "Round" and "pound" do rhyme properly, in neighbouring lines, so the sound itself seems to spin. In the third stanza nothing rhymes at all, and the line lengths wander. The pattern loses its footing just when she is staring hardest into the mirror. Only in the last stanza does a faint echo return, in "time" and "Home."
That final stanza changes the voice. The speaker addresses herself: "Take Courage, Friend." The self splits in two so that one half can comfort the other. "That -- was a former time" is said calmly, as if an earlier life has simply closed. Then comes the surprising pairing of "Heaven" and "Old Home." The poem doesn't explain them. Judging by the word "Heaven," she may be imagining death, or a change so complete that it feels like arriving somewhere new. What sticks is the tone. Heaven is something we "might learn to like," as if it were a new town or a rented house, and the exclamation mark makes the cheer sound brave, even a little forced. Has she persuaded herself, or is she only talking herself into it? The poem leaves that open.
This is why the poem matters. Dickinson turns an abstract terror, losing the sense of one's own reality, into small household actions: patting, turning, peering, shaking. Her typical tools do the work of confusion. The dashes break the thought into gasps, the capitals make words like "Glass," "Being" and "Owner" feel like objects on a table, and the invented "possibler" shows ordinary language failing. The poem ends in a brisk pep talk rather than a solution, which is closer to how people actually cope with something they can't explain.