The Brain—is wider than the Sky—
For—put them side by side—
The one the other will contain
With ease—and you—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—
For—hold them—Blue to Blue—
The one the other will absorb—
As sponges—Buckets—do—

The Brain is just the weight of God—
For—Heft them—Pound for Pound—
And they will differ—if they do—
As Syllable from Sound—

Emily Dickinson, c. 1862

“The enigmatic final verse, with its startling image of God and the brain being hefted like cabbages, has puzzled readers since the poem was published. Some read it as creationism (God made the brain), others as atheism (the brain thought up God). The simile with phonology – sound is a seamless continuum, a syllable is a demarcated unit of it – suggests a kind of pantheism: God is everywhere and nowhere, and every brain incarnates a finite measure of divinity. The loophole “if they do” suggests mysticism – and, of course, agnosticism. The ambiguity is surely intentional, and I doubt that anyone could defend a single interpretation as the correct one."



"I like to read the verse as suggesting that the mind, in contemplating its place in cosmos, at some point reaches its own limitations and runs into puzzles that seem to belong in a separate, divine realm. Free will and subjective experience, for example, are alien to our concept of causation and feel like a divine spark inside us. Morality and meaning seem to inhere in a reality that exists independent of our judgements. But that separateness may be the illusion of a brain that makes it impossible for us not to think they are separate from us. Ultimately we have no way of knowing, because we are our brains and have no way of stepping outside them to check. But if we are thereby trapped, it is a trap that we can hardly bemoan, for it is wider than the sky, deeper than the sea, and perhaps as weighty as God."