Analysis of "I never saw a Moor" and "'Faith' is a fine invention"

Thesis: Whereas "I never saw a Moor" discusses the existence of God directly, "'Faith' is a fine invention" is a commentary on human views of God and science rather than on the subject itself. The two poems connect in that the opinions that Dickenson analyzes in the latter poem are presented in the former.

• "I never saw a Moor" argues directly for the existence of God.
• There is parallel structure between the first and fifth lines, "I never saw a Moor" (1) and "I never spoke with God" (5) as well as with "yet" in lines 3 and 7. 
• This structure serves to illustrate Dickenson's argument that God exists.
• Dickenson claims that she can be as sure that God exists as she can be that any place she has not seen can be, because she is taking both purely on faith, yet it would be ludicrous to deny the existence of the sea.
• "'Faith' is a fine invention", on the other hand, refers to people's viewpoints on God.
• Rather than making direct claims with "I" as she does in the former poem, Dickenson refers to "Gentlemen"; the different pronoun indicates that she is not considering her own feelings, but general human emotion.
• This poem states that people tend to consider God relevant to their day-to-day lives, but irrelevant to science and its "emergencies."
• "When Gentlemen can see" (2) is contrasted with "In an Emergency" (4) by means of the conjunction "But" (3). Thus, the things that people can see, where faith is acceptable, is different than the world people cannot directly observe, in which faith is thrown to the wayside in favor of science.
• This opinion is often how people reconcile science and religion, and Dickenson references this reconciliation in this poem, but does not refer to her own feelings on the matter.
• While Dickenson is critical of the reconciliation of God and science in "'Faith' is a fine invention", she illustrates this opinion herself in "I never saw a Moor".
• Her first poem argues for God on the basis that there are things that science takes for granted (despite a lack of personal experience).
• Thus, she believes in scientific principles, because she will take evidence of photographs as data that illustrates the existence of foreign places.
• However, she also argues for God; therefore, she is arguing both for God and for science, and is therefore expressing an opinion that God can exist in a world with scientific principles - and is therefore displaying a reconciliation of God and science, of faith and empiricism, despite so criticizing this approach in her latter poem.