As a college literature teacher, the goal of the author is to enable students to create their own meaning from their encounter with a text, respecting the text's sources, limits, contexts, and possibilities as well as their own. Fostering this creative response is among the greatest challenges and rewards of the profession. While teaching EN102: Literature to first-year cadets at the United States Military Academy (West Point) in the spring of 2015, the author found one path to that reward through a two-part exercise that invited them to cartoon their responses to a poem by Emily Dickinson. The results not only fulfilled several of the course's objectives as well as her own, it also taught something about icons and closure in Dickinson's work. For students who were more inclined to resist poetry than to embrace it, the results also provided tangible proof of their encounter with a given Dickinson poem and the meaning they made in the process. Before sharing the exercise and its results, the author will first provide some background on the unique teaching and learning environment at West Point, on the institutional vision for EN102, and on her individual experience of the course.