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The Soul has Bandaged moments —
When too appalled to stir —
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her —

I can't help rewriting in my head the last two lines of this stanza, like so:

She feels some ghastly Fright comes up
And stops to look at her —

Are both versions correct? Why did Emily Dickinson write come up and stop instead of comes up and stops and what meaning does such a choice of words impart?

John Smith
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    You are not Emily Dickinson. You may think of and reword her poems as you like, but don't presume to correct her grammar. Poems do not fit to ordinary grammar rubrics. Anyway, you're wrong about the type of clause required by feel. Like all sense verbs, feel has its own rules, including welcoming infinitive complement clauses. – John Lawler Mar 30 '23 at 16:25
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    I saw you pick it up. I heard him speak. I felt it touch me. All use the infinitive form of the verb. – Kate Bunting Mar 30 '23 at 16:32
  • Voting to reopen since there is a genuine semantic difference here. – alphabet Mar 31 '23 at 20:15

1 Answers1

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As Macmillan explains, when you use "feel" with a bare infinitive ("She feels some ghastly Fright come up"), it typically means:

to notice something that is touching you or something that is happening to your body

When you use it with an ordinary finite clause ("She feels (that) some ghastly Fright comes up"), though, "feel" typically means one of two things:

  1. To have a particular way of thinking about something, especially one that depends on your emotions rather than on facts or evidence
  2. to notice something that you know is there but cannot see, hear, touch, or smell

Of course, the bare infinitive is always "come," whereas the finite simple present would here be the third-person singular "comes."

So replacing "come" with "comes" would result in the word "feel" having a somewhat different meaning. In particular, one would likely interpret "feel" in your version as "believes," whereas "feel" in Dickinson's version means something more like "viscerally experiences."

As a further example, compare:

  1. I felt he was trying to grab me.
  2. I felt him try to grab me.

Only (2) entails that he actually touched you.

alphabet
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