But it was not Dickinson's situation. Copyright 1990 by Paula Bennett. The final stanza could mean that the speaker can escape from prose into verse as easily as a bird can fly from the pound. As soon as her captors turn their backs, she can read or write poetry. Often, however, not only the diction and imagery of her letters but also their formal structures overlap with those of her verse.
Some letters are far too metrical to be considered prose poems or free verse.
For Dickinson, writing cannot be broken down into two separate modes, the unmetered language of prose and the metered language of verse. Instead, the metricality of her prose insists on the continuity and likeness of the two modes. From Fictions of Form in American Poetry . Princeton UP, 1993. Thus, in overstepping the bounds of genre, Dickinson is simultaneously overstepping the boundaries of gender.