One muggy afternoon last week, I was riding the London Underground to Victoria Station and idly scanning advertisements for getaways to Ibiza and relief from piles when my eye fell upon some unexpected lines of verse. The Poetry on the Underground project all too often makes you turn for relief to the dental-floss ads, but these lines held my gaze and shook me as I read. By Emily Dickinson, they were a startling apparition among the sweaty straphangers and spike-haired teens. I didn’t recognize the poem but looked it up when I got home. Here it is:

I stepped from Plank to Plank
A slow and cautious way
The Stars about my Head I felt
About my Feet the Sea

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch –
This gave me that precarious Gait
Some call Experience.

I read this work in “The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson” (Little, Brown, 770 pages, $19.95), edited by Thomas H. Johnson. This poem, which Dickinson wrote in 1864, is number 875 in his edition. The more recent “The Poems of Emily Dickinson” (Belknap Press, 692 pages, $29.95), edited by R.W. Franklin (especially his so-called “Reading Edition”), which presents variants and corrections of many texts, is indispensable, too.

As I read these lines on that sweltering ride, I forgot that Emily Dickinson was an American poet, a fact that under other circumstances would have caused me a pang of homesickness. Her language, pure and simple yet tilted with the indefinable awkwardness that is one of her signature effects, struck me as having come from no particular country or place. The poem was at once immediate and timeless. Amid the racket of the clanking rails, a singular voice had silently but dramatically entered my consciousness in a rapid sweep of the eyes. The poem was disturbing, but it comforted, too; it seemed to present a truth I couldn’t quite grasp but that I understood at some more wordless level.

The curious lack of punctuation, the capital letters, the off-rhymes – all signal characteristics of her mature work – might have been the work of a child. But there was nothing childlike about the beauty of the verse or its contents. She seems to be crossing a muddy patch of ground, stepping from plank to plank to avoid getting her feet wet. Then she “feels” the stars above her head and the sea about her feet. How do you feel the stars overhead? There is the sudden apprehension that the universe has shrunk to a narrow strait between the heavens above and the waters below. In this diminished tunnel-universe, she feels her way forward by touching the stars over her and the waters beneath her; more, it’s a passage known only in a tactile way, for nothing can be seen.

I have the feeling that, like one of her beloved cats, she whiskers her way forward in the dark, never knowing whether the next inch she covers will be her last. All at once, in the final lines, she moves from the snugly palpable, with its hints of unforeseeable dangers, to a conclusion. “This gave me that precarious Gait / Some call Experience.” This is the sort of sly summation of which Dickinson is so great a master. This creeping, touchy feely process, which encompasses the starry sky and the vast ocean, this fingertip epistemology, is, after all, nothing more than what we call “experience.” Yet how we now come to a new and peculiar delectation of that tired old word after our own eyes have felt their way through the eight lines of the poems!

“Inch” and “Experience” don’t really rhyme; they barely conjure up an assonance. Still, the echo clinches the poem; it is a felt rhyme more than an aural one, like the snapping of fingers or the swish of a hand across a darkened surface. The thick, almost chewy sound of “inch” resolving into the suave sibilance of “experience.” The wit of that final word cuts as it falls on the ear. This shaky saunter, this blind groping – this is all our “experience” amounts to in the end. But it’s also obliquely autobiographical. The shy genius of Amherst knew how precarious her own gait was. To elect the utmost solitude and at the same time to renounce the solace of certainties, as Emily Dickinson did, must have made every footstep auspicious as well as precarious.

This isn’t the whole story, for “experience” is merely what “some call” this mole-like feeling-forward. The little poem is in fact a rather biting gloss on that cover-all word we toss so blithely about. We invoke “experience,” but in truth it’s a pious sham. Yet Dickinson does not offer despair as the outcome of our blinkered exploration of the world; she didn’t wish to suggest that we can know nothing in the end. The poem I read as I swayed with my fellow passengers – indeed, as we ourselves burrowed through the subterranean labyrinth of the London Underground toward some vague and steamy destination – supplants our conscious notion of experience with the actual feeling of it. Dickinson doesn’t offer us a definition of human experience; she gives us the experience itself. We feel those planks, the stars, the invisible waters, and that final, provisional inch.

The Tube lumbered into Victoria Station and we all descended. I’d momentarily forgotten where I was headed, but it didn’t matter. I felt my way forward with my companions, all of us inching together toward the exits. I felt unreasonably lucky to carry the elation the poet’s words had given me down the sooty streets and even took distinct pleasure in my own precarious gait.