"Shall I take thee, the Poet said"

Shall I take thee, the Poet said
To the propounded word?
Be stationed with the Candidates
Till I have finer tried --

The Poet searched Philology
And when about to ring
For the suspended Candidate
There came unsummoned in --
That portion of the Vision
The Word applied to fill
Not unto nomination
The Cherubim reveal --

F (1243), 1872

This poem represents another one of Dickinson's many that directly reference the act of creating poetry. In it, a poet struggles to find the correct word(s) to use for a poem, compiling an exhaustive list of potential "Candidates." Eventually, having failed to locate a suitable replacement, they resign to use the word that they had originally considered when they are suddenly struck by the arrival of the perfect word, as if sent by the angels above. 

Like many of her art-centered poems, this poem interestingly explores her attitudes regarding the relationship between the act of writing and creation, as it portrays the poet in distinctly religious terms, whether being represented as A) a God-like figure themselves or B) God having a firsthand degree of influence over them. Dickinson's diction and imagery throughout the poem adds to this religious conflation. Most obviously, she invokes the angelic race of the Cherubim at the poem's end, crediting them with providing her the perfect word she had been searching for. She also does it more subtly with her use of the word "Candidate" which, aside from its everyday meaning, was also a term used in her local Congregational church to denote hopeful new converts according to the Dickinson lexicon. She also plays with this concept from a formal standpoint as well, particularly in her clever use of capitalization. For instance, and perhaps most tellingly, she does not capitalize the first appearance of "word" in the first stanza, but does in the second after it has been ordained, in some sense, by the cherubim. This connection to the Word of God feels especially relevant given her repeated capitalization of "Poet," which plays into the idea that poets are endowed with God-like abilities due to their role as creators. 

Knowing Dickinson's penchant for creating various versions of her poems, often with wildly different wording from version to version, the poem can also be seen as a humorous ode to her fascination with editing and revising. It's worth noting that even this poem went through a handful of word changes and substitutions. One must speculate which one of these substitutions may have represented the perfect word granted to her by the Cherubim. 

http://edl.byu.edu/lexicon/term/601710

Manuscript of the poem, with visible word substitutions.