(Fr 124, J 216)
This poem is one of several in Dickinson’s oeuvre, including “I DIEDFOR BEAUTY—BUTWASSCARCE” and “WHAT INN IS THIS” in which she visualizes the dead in their underground dwellings in rela- tion both to the world of the living and the world to come. In “A COFFIN—IS A SMALL DOMAIN,” she calls the deceased “A Citizen of Paradise,” while in this poem the dead are identified as “the meek members of the Resurrection.” The biblical allusion here is to the Beatitudes, where Christ bestows his blessing on particular virtues: “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew: 5:1–5). Yet the poem contains no vision of this reward, and the only “earth” the dead seem to inherit is the tiny parcel in which they are buried.
There is irony in the notion of their “safety” within their alabaster bedrooms, with their “Rafter
of Satin, and Roof of Stone.” The stanza is richly orchestrated, with its saturated s, t, and r sounds (Safe, alabaster, sleep, untouched [twice], Resur- rection, rafter, satin, roof stone), its interspersed m sounds (Morning, meek, members), and echo- ing long and short a’s (safe, chambers, alabaster, satin, rafters), in addition to the repetition of “Untouched.” The effect would be one of soothing harmony, were it not counteracted by the inexact rhyme “noon/Stone” which interrupts the musical- ity and injects a note of uneasiness. Does the exclu- sion of the dead from earthly time imply that their realm is now eternity, or is that promised “Morn- ing” and “noon” of their immortality unreachable as well?
To seek an answer, the reader must look to the second stanza, and here his difficulties begin, since Dickinson wrote no less than four versions of the concluding verse. As she gained experience in composing her fascicles or manuscript books, she left an increasing number of variants. While the version given by Franklin was recorded in fascicle 6, she recorded three alternative second stanzas in fascicle 10. Many scholars are of the opinion that there is no way to determine which version Dickin- son preferred, or even if she had a preference. But clues to her judgment can be found in the history of the poem’s circulation.
Emily sent the original 1859 version to her beloved friend and sister-in-law, SUSAN
HUNTINGTON GILBERT DICKINSON, whose literary
opinion she greatly respected. It contained this sec- ond stanza:
Light laughs the breeze In her Castle above them— Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,
Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence— Ah, what sagacity perished here!
When Sue found this stanza inadequate, Emily composed a second version, sending her a note with the hope that “Perhaps this verse will suit you better.” It begins:
Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them— Worlds scoop their Arcs— And Firmament—row—
But Sue regally declared herself “not suited with the second verse,” insisting that the first stanza was complete in itself:
It is remarkable as the chain lightening that blinds us hot nights in the Southern sky, but it does not go with the ghostly shimmer of the first verse as well as the other one. . . . Strange things always go alone. . . . You never made a peer for that verse, and I guess you[r] kingdom doesn’t hold one.
Sue was no better pleased with the other two alternatives Emily sent her with the query, “Is this frostier?” But when she arranged with editor and close friend SAMUEL BOWLES for the poem to be published
in the Springfield Republican, Sue sent the first “bab- bling bee” version. The poem appeared on March 1, 1862, under the title, “The Sleeping,” with “regular- ized” punctuation, capitalization, and line breaks.
What Emily’s feelings were about the publica- tion is not known. However, when she first wrote to THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON, the man she
would style her “mentor,” on April 15, 1862, she enclosed the poem with the second stanza begin- ning, “Grand go the Years—.” By this time she was no longer asking Sue to critique her work. She told Higginson: “The Mind is so near itself—it cannot see distinctly—and I have none to ask—.” The many critics who regard this version as superior to the rest see its inclusion with the letter to Hig- ginson as evidence that Dickinson did, too. Dick- inson’s latest editor, R. W. Franklin, selected this version for The Poems of Emily Dickinson: The Read- ing Edition, as her “latest full effort.”
Turning to the variants themselves, we find in both the “babbling bee” version and “Grand go the years” the same underlying notion of nature’s indif- ference to the dead. In the earlier variant, we are in a spring or summer world, just above the grave, amid familiar Dickinsonian imagery of breezes, bees, and birds. Cynthia Griffin Wolff sees in this a double irony: Not only is lighthearted nature insen- sitive to what is below, but spring, a time of rebirth and symbol of resurrection, has no transcendent connotations for the dead. The “sagacity” that has “perished” is “the ancient discipline of natural theology, which found evidence of God’s goodness and love scattered throughout the natural world” (Emily Dickinson, 318). In this version, the poem ends with an ironic commentary on the “falseness of Christ’s promises and the natural symbols that are said to portend them.”
In the later variant, the perspective opens up as the poet reaches out to distant dimensions, both spatial and temporal, placing the “Alabaster Cham- bers” of the dead against the background of the cosmos and human history. She sets both time and the planets whirling in enormous cycles above the still graves. The sublime tone is heightened by the biblical word firmaments: the immense arc of the heavens, suggesting the planets as they rotate, or, as they do in this image, “row.” When history is
Facsimile of “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” Dickinson sent to her sister-in-law, Susan Dickinson, who had disapproved of the second stanza. She wrote “Perhaps this verse would suit you better—Sue— Emily.” (By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard
University)
introduced, the motion changes to a falling one. “Diadems—[the crowns of royalty] drop / And Doges [rulers of Italian principalities—Venice and Genoa—during the Renaissance]—surrender—.” Then, in the final two lines, we are returned to still- ness, one that is both “soundless” and frozen. Cres- cents and arcs shrink to dots on a two-dimensional disc, suggesting snow falling on snow, perhaps over the winter graves. The image, which is not eas- ily visualized, evokes an existential coldness rather than a physical one. As the “dots” fall silently, they disappear into a flat, frozen realm, just as the dead vanish in the frost of time and universal indiffer- ence. The exact rhyme at the end, row/snow, rein- forces the chilling conclusiveness of the image. The absence of the dead in this stanza, the very fact that the “meek members of the Resurrection” are not mentioned again, deepens the sense that the dead are untouched, not only by time, but by the eternity they have been promised.
While most readers see the poem in these bleak terms, at least one respected scholar sees greater ambiguity. Cristanne Miller believes that, “In this poem, Dickinson clearly compares the world of the dead in stanza one with that of the living in stanza 2, but she leaves the reader to determine the point of the contrast” (“Approaches,” 226).
See also “BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR
DEATH —” and PUBLICATION AND EDITORIAL SCHO LARSHIP.
FURTHER READING
Cristanne Miller, “Approaches to Reading Dick- inson,” 223–228; David Porter, “Early Achieve- ment,” in Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom, ed., 74–75; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 316–321.