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Teaching Tips: I started Early-Took my Dog, by Emily Dickinson

Chart how the speaker's views of the sea change over the course of the ballad. Find lines or gestures that illustrate how the sea views the speaker.
In her poetry, Dickinson capitalizes many words and places many dashes. Can you find moments where this practice changes or adds to your understanding of the ballad?
Examine the rhyming words in each stanza. What ideas do these rhymes pair together through their repetition of sound? What is the effect of Dickinson's rhyming words that "don't quite rhyme?"
Look at some other poems about the sea:
- "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life," by Walt Whitman
- "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- "The Triumph of Time," (beginning "I will go back to the great sweet mother / Mother and lover of men, the sea"), by Algernon Swinburne
- "Sea Fever," by John Masefield
How does their treatment of the sea differ from Dickinson's?