Emily Dickinson's poem, "The Brain - is wider than the Sky," compares and contrasts three entities with the human brain: the sky, the sea, and God.
The first stanza contrasts the brain with the sky and shows that the brain is wider, because it can think about the sky and at the same time can think about the person who is thinking about the sky, and it can perform this operation easily.
The second stanza contrasts the brain with the sea and claims that the brain can absorb the sea as a sponge absorbs a bucket of water, again referring the vast thinking ability of the brain.
The third stanza contrasts, as well as compares, the brain with God. This stanza causes the problem of interpretation: the casual reader tends to find the speaker making a blasphemous parallel by asserting that the brain is the same as God.
The devout believer contends that God is not limited to any one item of His creation. God is considered to be above and greater than all His creations, and the human brain is only one of His many creations, so to claim that "The Brain is just the weight of God" sounds as if the speaker means that they are equal.
But the blasphemy charge can be denied with a closer look at what the poem actually does, especially in the last three lines of the last stanza: "For heft—them Pound for Pound — / And they will differ — if they do — / As Syllable from Sound."
The speaker is not claiming to offer direct knowledge of God but instead is offering her conclusion that the brain and God are similar because of their vastness as demonstrated in her contrasts in stanzas one and two. The sky and the sea are huge creations, and yet the brain can conceive of them as ideas, which means that the brain can hold them—or at least hold the ideas of them.
In claiming that the brain and God are close in significance, the speaker still leaves open the idea that they do differ; they differ as a syllable differs from sound. The difference is real, because there is a real difference between a syllable and sound.
But because the point of her speculation is to celebrate the importance and vastness of the brain's abilities, the speaker does assert that the brain and God are similar; after all, it is the brain that conceives the idea of God. However, God still remains greater than the brain, because while the brain is a syllable, God is sound, or the brain is a representation of God, as a syllable is a representation of sound.
Dickinson was well acquainted with the King James Version of the Bible. No doubt, when she wrote this poem, she had in mind the following biblical claim form Genesis 1:26: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” The idea that a human being is made in the image of God was not first conceived by a poet; that claim is found in the Bible.
