Mary Ann,

Exactly! I don't think it is a stretch to say that there is an opposition like that going on here. As Robert points out, the contrasting imagery of cloth and machinery supports it (and, to cite another thread somewhere in this fray where i think you had also posted, the double meaning of "ticking" is a perfect embodiment of this paradox, with the heart/bomb contrast in one image).

It reminds me of another Dickinson poem where something explosive is held in check by "feminine" imagery--"On my volcano grows the grass." I do a reading of that poem in my book The Ghost of Meter, showing that when the volcano explodes, it does so in iambic pentameter as opposed to the more decorous grass and birds of the ballad meter in the poem's opening. In this poem, though, the ballad meter stays under control, with quite "scrupulous exactness. . ."