The Full Text of “There is no Frigate like a Book”
1There is no Frigate like a Book
2To take us Lands away
3Nor any Coursers like a Page
4Of prancing Poetry —
5This Traverse may the poorest take
6Without oppress of Toll —
7How frugal is the Chariot
8That bears the Human Soul —
The Full Text of “There is no Frigate like a Book”
1There is no Frigate like a Book
2To take us Lands away
3Nor any Coursers like a Page
4Of prancing Poetry —
5This Traverse may the poorest take
6Without oppress of Toll —
7How frugal is the Chariot
8That bears the Human Soul —
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“There is no Frigate like a Book” Introduction
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"There is no Frigate like a Book" is a brief poem by Emily Dickinson, which she enclosed in a letter to a friend in 1873. The poem's speaker celebrates the power of literature, marveling that no splendid ship or noble steed has the power a book does to carry people to another world. Better yet, the speaker says, this magical transport is cheap: you don't have to be rich to read a book and be carried away by the glory of language.
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“There is no Frigate like a Book” Summary
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There's no ship quite like a book to carry us far away—or any horses as swift as a page of lively poetry. Even the poorest people can travel this way, without having to worry about money: considering that it transports the soul itself, the splendid racing-cart of literature sure is cheap!
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“There is no Frigate like a Book” Themes
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The Power of Literature
"There is no frigate like a book" describes how reading literature transports people to glorious new places in their minds and hearts. The speaker argues that books have the power to bring anyone to faraway “Lands” simply by engaging their imaginations. And this kind of mental travel, the speaker implies, can enrich people’s very souls.
The speaker doesn’t just celebrate literature’s power to transport people, but declares that the kind of traveling people do when they read books is even more wonderful than literal travel. The poem opens by declaring that even a “Frigate,” or a large ship, cannot bring people to new places quite as well as a book can, and that no “Coursers” (or swift horses) can match a page of “prancing Poetry.” All these comparisons suggest that literature isn’t just a great way to “travel,” but a vehicle that takes people to places they could never reach with a real-life boat or horse.
And books aren’t just more powerful than ordinary travel: they’re also cheaper—and this more democratic! While travel is expensive and time-consuming, reading is an experience available to even the “poorest” of people. Literature, the speaker implies, is inherently democratic: anyone can experience it “without oppress of Toll” (that is, without the burden of paying a cent). Books are thus not only a more fulfilling means of discovery than travel, but also a more just and equitable one.
This matters because, in this speaker’s eyes, reading isn’t just fun, but spiritually important. In its final lines, the poem imagines literature as a “Chariot that bears the human soul,” carrying the reader’s very spirit to new realms of experience and feeling. Reading, the speaker thus suggests, is an essential way of engaging and flexing the human imagination—of bringing readers into contact with people, places, and ideas that may deeply enrich their lives.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “There is no Frigate like a Book”
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Lines 1-2
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away"There is no Frigate like a Book" starts out by making a pretty big claim for literature. Books, in this speaker's eyes, don't just have the power to metaphorically carry people away to far-off lands: they do a considerably better job of it than even the grandest "frigate" (or sailing ship).
These lines introduce the extended metaphor that will shape this whole poem: the idea of reading as travel. That's a metaphor that goes so deep down into the English language that English speakers might not even know they're using it! For instance, people who say they felt "transported" by a wonderful book might not be thinking about how that word suggests a journey. But in this short poem, the speaker is going to think hard about this common idea—and suggest that the journeys people go on when they read are deeper, richer, and better than any journey they might take in the "real world."
Even the image the speaker uses in this first line makes reading sound like a grand adventure. A "frigate" has all sorts of romantic connotations: it's the kind of boat you'd expect to run into in an adventure story, an old-fashioned ship that might be involved in a daring sea battle. But even such a grand ship has nothing on a "Book," the speaker insists. A frigate, after all, can carry people to wild and distant places. But a book can carry people to "Lands" that never even existed—and it can do it instantaneously.
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Lines 3-4
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry — -
Lines 5-6
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll — -
Lines 7-8
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul —
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“There is no Frigate like a Book” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Extended Metaphor
"There is no Frigate like a Book" is built around a central extended metaphor of reading as a kind of travel. To this poem's speaker, a book is like any number of glamorous vehicles, from a sailing ship to a gilded chariot—except it's even better. While "frigate[s]" and "Coursers" might be elegant and swift, they're nowhere near as powerful as books, which can instantaneously "transport" people to places they've never been—and even to places that don't really exist.
Those "places" themselves might be metaphorical, too. When the speaker describes books carrying the "Human Soul," there's the sense that books have the power to take people on enriching spiritual voyages. Reading, in this speaker's eyes, can be a journey to a deeper understanding of one's own inner life, as well as a way of visiting other people's imaginative worlds.
Books thus don't just have the power to carry people away in the blink of an eye, taking them right out of their daily lives. They also have the ability to make those daily lives better and deeper when the reader returns from their "voyage." By presenting reading as a metaphorical journey of the soul, the poem's speaker suggests that people return from their literary adventures changed—and often richer for their travels.
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Allusion
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Parallelism
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Enjambment
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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"There is no Frigate like a Book" 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.
- Frigate
- Coursers
- Traverse
- Oppress of Toll
- Frugal
- Chariot
- Bears
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A grand sailing ship.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “There is no Frigate like a Book”
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Form
"There is no Frigate like a Book" is a short, simple poem, written as a single eight-line stanza (or octet).
That octet also breaks down into two four-line stanzas (or quatrains), which take the form of ballad stanzas. This means they use common meter and an ABCB rhyme scheme (a form Dickinson loved and used often—see the Meter and Rhyme Scheme sections for more on that). Here, the first quatrain marvels at the transporting magic of literature, and the second quatrain delights in how cheap books are, considering their power.
In one sense, this compact poem feels like a little nugget that readers can eat in one bite. On the other hand, it's doing exactly the expansive magic trick it describes: it manages to fit grand images of sailing ships, prancing horses, and splendid chariots into a tiny space.
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Meter
This poem uses one of Dickinson's favorite meters: common meter, also sometimes called ballad meter. That means that the lines here alternate between iambic tetrameter—lines of four iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm—and iambic trimeter, lines of three iambs.
Here's how that looks in lines 1-2:
There is | no Frig- | ate like | a Book
To take | us Lands | awayThis singsongy meter is—as its name suggests—pretty common, and turns up everywhere from nursery rhymes to hymns. Dickinson used common meter all the time, exploring complicated ideas and feelings in a deceptively simple way.
That simplicity helps the poem to make its point: even this plain little scrap of writing can conjure a grand and vivid adventure in its reader's mind.
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Rhyme Scheme
"There is no Frigate like a Book" uses the following rhyme scheme in each of its quatrains:
ABCB
This pattern, which is the standard rhyme scheme for a ballad stanza, appears in a lot of Dickinson's deceptively simple poems. But readers will quickly notice that there's something different about the first set of B rhymes here. The words "away" and "poetry" aren't perfect rhymes, but slant rhymes, only partly matched. Those out-of-the-ordinary sounds reflect the exhilarating freedom and novelty the speaker finds in books: reading helps the speaker to have out-of-the-ordinary experiences, too.
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“There is no Frigate like a Book” Speaker
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All the reader learns about this poem's speaker is that they love and value reading. Books, to this speaker, aren't just a way to pass the time: they're vehicles that carry their readers to the furthest reaches of the imagination, enriching their very souls.
This fair-minded speaker also seems delighted that the power of literature is available to everyone. One doesn't have to be rich to take a literary journey—and to the speaker, that's a very good thing indeed. In their eyes, literature isn't just powerful, it's democratic.
Readers might well imagine this passionate, imaginative speaker as Dickinson herself: she enclosed this poem in a letter to a friend, and it expresses ideas she deeply believed in.
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“There is no Frigate like a Book” Setting
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There's no distinct setting in this poem. Everything takes place in the speaker's imagination. But that's precisely the point! This speaker feels as if they're sailing away on the high seas, galloping on a noble steed, or racing in a chariot—all because they're reading a book.
Since a book works on the imagination, the speaker suggests, it can carry its readers far away from the everyday place they sit. It almost doesn't matter what the speaker's actual surroundings are like: with a book in hand, they're in an internal world of exhilarating adventure and wonder.
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Literary and Historical Context of “There is no Frigate like a Book”
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Literary Context
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was one of the leading lights of the American Romantic movement but only became widely known years after her death. Famously reclusive, she published only a few anonymous poems during her lifetime. "There is no Frigate like a Book" is one of the many poems she drafted on odd scraps of paper—old envelopes, the backs of grocery lists—and kept in a private trunk in her bedroom. But this one did see the light of day: she enclosed it in a letter to her cousins Frances and Louisa Norcross.
With its common meter, its singsongy quatrains, and its dramatic dashes, this poem is a textbook example of Dickinson's characteristic style. Dickinson often used deceptively simple forms to communicate her vast, strange, and imaginative inner life. Some critics see her less as a Romantic and more as an early Modernist, the forbear of inward-looking, experimental 20th-century writers like Virginia Woolf. But the passionate love of literature on display in this poem also fits right in with Dickinson's contemporary world. For instance, Dickinson was a big fan of novelist Charlotte Brontë, who similarly found solace, inspiration, and adventure in books.
While Dickinson was unknown during her lifetime, she's become one of the most famous and beloved of all poets since her death. Writers from Elizabeth Bishop to Evie Shockley count her as a major influence.
Historical Context
Emily Dickinson's passionate personality and volcanic intellect wouldn't have been too comfortable for many of the people around her in 19th-century rural Massachusetts. In that respectable, conventional time and place, women weren't expected to be geniuses.
And the 19th century in general was a pretty tough time to be a woman who wanted to write. Dickinson's hero Charlotte Brontë was only one of the great 19th-century women writers who published under a male pen name—and many of those writers, like George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and George Sand (Amantine Dupin), are still better-known by their pseudonyms today.
To the reclusive Dickinson, literature thus wasn't just a vehicle, but a channel: a way of both traveling beyond the confines of her situation and fully expressing her wild inner world, without drawing the unwanted attention of the neighbors. For much of her short life, Dickinson rarely left the family home she shared with her parents and her sister Lavinia. But her poetry careened from the heights of the sky to the shadowy land of death.
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More “There is no Frigate like a Book” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to two versions of the poem read aloud: the first the edited version Dickinson's first publishers released, and the latter the rediscovered original. Dickinson's early editors often made substantial changes to her distinctive style.
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Dickinson's Life — Learn more about Dickinson's life and times at the website of the Emily Dickinson Museum.
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The Unknown Dickinson — Read an essay by one of Dickinson's biographers about Dickinson's unconventional life.
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The Poem in Dickinson's Hand — See images of the poem in Dickinson's own handwriting. Dickinson often wrote on tiny scraps of paper: one of the drafts of this poem appears on the torn corner of an envelope!
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Dickinson's Legacy — Watch a recent discussion about Dickinson's influence on American poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Emily Dickinson
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