The Full Text of “I like a look of Agony”
1I like a look of Agony,
2Because I know it's true—
3Men do not sham Convulsion,
4Nor simulate a Throe—
5The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death—
6Impossible to feign
7The Beads upon the Forehead
8By homely Anguish strung.
The Full Text of “I like a look of Agony”
1I like a look of Agony,
2Because I know it's true—
3Men do not sham Convulsion,
4Nor simulate a Throe—
5The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death—
6Impossible to feign
7The Beads upon the Forehead
8By homely Anguish strung.
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“I like a look of Agony” Introduction
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The speaker of Emily Dickinson's "I like a look of Agony" finds a sense of comfort in seeing people in "agony." That's not necessarily because the speaker wants others to hurt, but because the speaker believes that pain is both a truthful and a humbling experience—one that cuts right through humanity's habitual deceit and insincerity. Like almost all of Dickinson's work, this poem wasn't published until after her death; it first appeared in the 1890 collection Poems of Emily Dickinson.
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“I like a look of Agony” Summary
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The speaker claims that they like to see pain on other people's faces because they know it's a genuine emotion. No person, the speaker argues, fakes spasms of anguish.
Once a person's eyes glaze over with suffering, the speaker observes, that's it: pain is as absolute as death, and just as impossible to fake. Sweat pops out on suffering people's brows as if the personified, humble figure of Pain itself were stringing a sweat-bead necklace there.
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“I like a look of Agony” Themes
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Pain as Truth
In Emily Dickinson's "I like a look of Agony," the speaker explains why they value the experience of witnessing other people's pain. Because people can’t fake the physical signs of pain, the speaker argues, a “look of Agony” is more trustworthy than just about any other expression. Through images of sweaty brows, clouded eyes, and violent convulsions, the speaker suggests that pain, however terrible, has a redeeming quality: it’s one of the few things in life that definitely isn’t false!
Pain, the speaker observes, is a feeling that can’t be faked—unlike most. Pain speaks for itself, creating an involuntary "look of Agony,” “beads” of sweat, and “glaze[d]” eyes. These reactions, the speaker notes, are “impossible to feign,” inherently truthful. The implication, then, is that a lot of other emotions are easy to fake (and therefore commonly faked). As a result, the speaker believes these emotions to be less genuine than visible reactions to pain. Pain, unlike other feelings, is hard either to deny or to simulate.
Because pain is honest, the speaker suggests, it has value. Pain might be terribly unpleasant, but it also cuts through the illusions and fakery of a lot of day-to-day life. Precisely because pain is so overwhelming and involuntary, the speaker “like[s]” to see it on people’s faces: if someone is in pain, they’re also having an honest experience, neither deceiving other people nor deceiving themselves.
Pain also reminds people that they’re mortal and not always in control: pain, the speaker notes, is next door to “Death,” an experience in which the body takes over and the mind becomes incapable of controlling the body's reactions. "Anguish” is thus “homely”—a word that can mean ugly, down-to-earth, and strangely cozy, all at once. In other words, “anguish” might seem pretty awful, but it’s also grounding, humbling, and honest, cutting through people’s lies and their delusions of control.
There is thus a unique truth to be found in human pain. The speaker enjoys witnessing pain because they value its authenticity. It is interesting to note, however, that the speaker doesn’t seem particularly interested in feeling agony themselves—just seeing other people experience it.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “I like a look of Agony”
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Lines 1-2
I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true—In these straightforward opening lines, the speaker makes their central point plain: the speaker enjoys seeing "Agony," or extreme pain, written across other people's faces because expressions of pain aren't faked.
Despite the rather troubling nature of what the speaker's actually saying—the fact that they like witnessing pain is a little unconventional, to say the least!—the actual sound of these lines is rhythmic and predictable. The poem will mostly use common meter: lines that alternate between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter. Iambs are metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm; tetrameter means there are four iambs per line, and trimeter means that there are three. Here's how that sounds in these opening lines:
I like | a look | of a- | gony
Because | I know | it's true—The steady pulse of this meter sounds a lot like a beating heart. This accessible, singsong effect makes the speaker's words all the more surprising and powerful. Despite the fact that the speaker is presenting a controversial and perhaps disturbing opinion, the rhythm of the words makes the message itself more palatable. In a way, this meter might trick the speaker's audience into calmly accepting what they're reading.
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Lines 3-6
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate a Throe—
The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death—
Impossible to feign -
Lines 7-8
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.
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“I like a look of Agony” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
In the first line of "I like a look of Agony"—a line that, given Dickinson's habit of not including separate titles for her poems, becomes the poem's effective title—the words "like" and "look" are alliterative. They also both have a single syllable and share consonance of the /k/ sound. As a result, they make the poem's opening line more musical and memorable.
When the speaker says "I like a look of Agony," they lay out the argument that will guide and define the next seven lines. By connecting the words "like" and "look" through sound, the speaker establishes the close relationship between their own enjoyment (of seeing agony written on other people's faces) and the expressions (the "look") of pain that they go on to describe in the rest of the poem.
The speaker thus uses alliteration to open their argument with a statement that is at once clear, punchy, abstract, and confusing. This decision sets the stage for the speaker to explain the rationale behind this surprising feeling. And the sonic connection between "like" and "look" is crucial to the poem's main point: the speaker's belief that they can perceive truth through pain.
The other moments of alliteration in the poem are quite subtle and fall in its final three lines. As with the shared /l/ sounds of line 1, these alliterative moments add rhythm and emphasis to the speaker's language.
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Metaphor
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Enjambment
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End-Stopped Line
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Caesura
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Parallelism
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"I like a look of Agony" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Sham
- Convulsion
- Simulate
- Throe
- Glaze
- Feign
- Beads
- Homely
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Fake, pretend. (The word can be a noun or a verb; here, it's a verb!)
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “I like a look of Agony”
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Form
Like many of Emily Dickinson's poems, "I like a look of Agony" is split up into two four-line stanzas, also known as quatrains. These quatrains also use the meter and rhyme scheme of a ballad (as many of Dickinson's poems do).
This simple, musical form turns up everything from nursery rhymes to pop songs. Along with Dickinson's careful use of caesura and end-stopping, the ballad stanzas here give the poem's strange and abstract ideas a clear structure.
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Meter
This poem is written in loose common meter (one of Dickinson's favorite meters). Poetry in common meter uses alternating lines of iambic tetrameter—that is, lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm (for eight beats total)—and iambic trimeter, lines of three iambs (for six beats total). Here's how that sounds in lines 5-6:
The Eyes | glaze once | —and that | is Death—
Imposs- | ible | to feignCommon meter lends the poem a simple, relatively predictable rhythm. The poem feels straightforward and musical, for the most part.
But this rhythm is a little off-kilter at times, with some of the even-numbered lines lacking the full eight beats expected of iambic tetrameter. Line 7, for instance, is missing its final stressed beat:
The Beads | upon | the Fore- | head
This ever-so-slightly off-balance meter suits this poem's unusual (and perhaps unsettling) worldview.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem uses the rhyme scheme of a ballad stanza:
ABCB
In other words, the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme with each other.
The rhyme scheme of this poem, like its meter, is predictable enough to create some musicality, but just off-kilter enough to disrupt its own patterns. The words "true" and "Throe," for example, aren't exact rhymes—they're slant rhymes. The rhyme scheme in the second stanza is even less regular. Although "feign" and "strung" sound somewhat similar, calling them true slant rhymes might be a stretch. The teetering rhyme scheme makes the poem feels a little uneasy—fitting for a poem that talks about the "throe[s]" of pain.
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“I like a look of Agony” Speaker
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Most of Dickinson's speakers are cryptic, and the speaker in "I like a look of Agony" is no exception. It's certainly possible to interpret the speaker as Dickinson herself, as many readers do; Dickinson was a deeply introspective person who wrote often about anguish and death.
That said, the poem itself doesn't give readers any specific details about who the speaker is or even what they want. The only thing readers know about the speaker is the argument they're making in the poem. Readers can perhaps extrapolate that because the speaker values truth so much (enough to enjoy expressions of pain, at least, because they're uniquely genuine), the speaker feels a certain way about the rest of the world. If truth is so important and rare to the speaker, readers can potentially assume that the speaker is relatively cynical about other people and other people's emotions.
This is a common theme among Dickinson's speakers: they often seem disillusioned with their societies and value a kind of honesty and self-expression that, they imply, is very rare.
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“I like a look of Agony” Setting
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This poem is so abstract that it really doesn't have a setting! The entire poem is more or less a thought experiment: rather than having any sort of narrative or transporting readers to a certain time or part of the world, it takes place entirely inside the speaker's own argument. One could imagine the poem being set mostly in the speaker's mind—it sounds like an intimate conversation, or even an internal monologue.
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Literary and Historical Context of “I like a look of Agony”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson was an American poet who lived from 1830-1886. She was relatively unknown as a writer during her lifetime and many of her poems were written on scraps of household paper. Though she often circulated her writing among friends, only 10 of her poems were published before her death. "I like a look of Agony" first appeared in Poems of Emily Dickinson, a collection of the poet's work published in 1890.
Although Dickinson's poetry typically uses regular meter and rhyme, the content of her poems tends to be imaginative and abstract. She was influenced by the elaborate conceits of 17th-century English Metaphysical poets like John Donne as well as by the later Romantic poets, including William Wordsworth, whose work often focuses often on individuality and emotion. Her Protestant upbringing also influenced her writing, as can be seen in her frequent use of common measure—a.k.a. hymn meter, so-called because it is the rhythm featured in many church hymns.
At the same time, Dickinson was a wholly unique and formally experimental writer, turning often to slant rhyme, unconventional capitalization, and idiosyncratic punctuation in her work. Dickinson's poetry also often explores themes related to mental illness, despair, and death. Her poem "I measure every Grief I meet" makes for an interesting companion piece to "I like a look of Agony," in that it similarly explores the speaker's relationship to other people's pain.
Historical Context
As a woman living in 19th-century Massachusetts, Dickinson enjoyed more freedoms than many early modern scholars typically assumed, but was still constrained by various social conventions of her time. Dickinson also came of age during an era of religious revivalism in Massachusetts. While she wasn't necessarily atheist or agnostic, Dickinson's relationship with her family's Protestant faith was certainly complicated. Her poetry's tongue-in-cheek explorations of religion, society, and science subvert many of the strict expectations of her time and express the curious and rebellious spirit for which she was known throughout her life.
Dickinson was also famously reclusive. Some speculate that she had chronic medical issues, mental and/or physical, that kept her isolated. She also experienced the deaths and illnesses of many loved ones throughout her life, which undoubtedly informed her poetry's preoccupation with grief and mortality.
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More “I like a look of Agony” Resources
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External Resources
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Dickinson's Biography — Learn more about Dickinson's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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Dickinson's Influences — Learn more about Dickinson's poetic influences.
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Dickinson's Health — Check out this page from the Emily Dickinson Museum's website focusing on the health issues that may have plagued Dickinson and her loved ones throughout her life.
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Her Own Society — A reading of Dickinson in the context of her literary relationships.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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