NORMAS Y REFERENCIAS

(1863) (Fr 706, J 640)

In this beautiful litany of loss, the best-known of Dickinson’s love poems, the speaker moves through a series of states of being with her beloved, finding each one barred to her. Since she cannot live, die, be resurrected, be judged by God, lost or saved with him, they “must meet apart,” in a place para- doxically defined as minuscule and vast, and nur- tured by “that White sustenance—/ Despair—.” In each hypothetical, rejected vision of meeting, the speaker unflinchingly juxtaposes the intensity of their love with the limiting reality confronting them.

In the first stanza, the poet rules out the possibil- ity of actually living with her beloved on the grounds that “It would be Life—/ And Life is over there— / Behind the Shelf.” Read in isolation, the lines have the half-bitter, half-resigned quality found in so many Dickinson poems in which the speaker acknowledges hunger and deprivation as a primary condition of her existence. In works such as “GOD GAVEA LOAF TOEVERY BIRD—,” “VICTORYCOMES LATE—,” and “WHONEVERWANTEDMADDEST JOY,”

satiety and fulfillment are elsewhere, out of reach, withheld from her.

However, as the first and second stanzas are joined by the enjambed lines, “Behind the Shelf / The Sexton keeps the key to—,” another meaning for “Life is over there” emerges. For the “porcelain” a church sexton locks up is the vessel used for the ceremony of wine and bread of the Lord’s Sup- per. The Life “Behind the shelf” thus refers to life eternal, which is symbolized by the Christian ritual. The speaker implies that she cannot live with her beloved because that would be Life, a fulfillment challenging God’s paradise. This tension between earthly and eternal life runs through the poem.

As biographer Cynthia Griffin Wolff puts it, “the very nature of the lovers’ excellence is a force that might disable God if it were permitted to exist” (Emily Dickinson, 419).

Dickinson used the image of a “porcelain life” earlier, in a letter to SAMUEL BOWLES, the crusad-

ing editor of the Springfield Republican, whom she revered, in which she asks about his and his family’s health. Explaining her anxiety for them, she writes:

I hope your cups are full. . . . In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well, lest one stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery. (L 193, late August 1858)

Here Dickinson takes the Psalmist’s symbol of a life overflowing with blessings, “My cup runneth over,” and transforms it into a complex image of both mortality and the destruction of romantic hopes (possibly hers for Bowles). In light of these associations, the “Sexton,” “Putting up / Our Life— His Porcelain—/ Like a Cup—” becomes a deity indifferent to human happiness. Not only is the Cup fragile, it is devalued by the keeper of mun- dane orderliness: “Discarded of the Housewife—/ Quaint—or Broke—.” The notion of broken lives/ hopes is carried forward in the final evolution of the crockery image, “A newer Sevres pleases—/ Old Ones crack—,” which suggests that the lovers’ relationship is an old one.

Having thus “explained” why she and her lover cannot live together, the speaker goes on, in the next two stanzas, to say why they could not die together, perhaps in a suicide pact, as critic Vivian Pollak sug- gests (Anxiety of Gender, 182–183). Here the barrier is that “One must wait / To shut the Other’s Gaze down—,” that is, to perform the ritual of closing the eyelids of the deceased, and neither would be capable of waiting. “You—could not—” she tells her beloved, but whether this inability would stem from excess of grief or because he is much older and thus likely to die first, or some other reason, we are not told. As for the speaker, seeing him die would be impossible for her without dying instantly herself, claiming her own “Right of Frost—.”

Judith Farr has written that this poem’s “dark and harrowing logic has made it a model of poetic argument” (Passion, 308). The key word here is

poetic, for it is difficult to see any simple logic in the argument of these stanzas. Since neither lover could wait, they might indeed die together. More- over, as Pollak writes, there is no compelling reason “why a corpse needs to have its eyes closed, unless she is implying that she needs help with dying, and that her lover would be incapable of murder . . . (Anxiety of Gender, 183). For Pollak, the only way to see the stanzas as “internally consistent” is to assume that “the real problem is not her inability but her unwillingness to die herself or to cause her lover to do so.” This is reading in a great deal, how- ever. It seems simpler to assume that “logic” is sec- ondary here to the logic of emotion, the speaker’s simultaneous convictions that she could not live a moment if her beloved were dead, but that any shared experience, even the transition from life to death, would be denied them. In all her poignant “explanations” of why she and her lover cannot be together, the deep, immovable conviction of the impossibility of love’s fulfillment precedes argu- ment or evidence.

The next two stanzas, 6 and 7, form “the hinge upon which the verse turns from earth to heaven” (Wolff, Life 421). Dickinson has a number of poems in which she anticipates a reunion in heaven with a beloved denied to her on earth. Thus, in a related poem written the previous year, “THERE CAME A

DAY—AT SUMMER’S FULL—,” she describes the

renunciation of an earthly love, but anticipates a union beyond the grave, in “that New Marriage—/ Justified—through Calvaries of Love!” In Fr 706, however, she devotes six stanzas to naming the obstacles to a reunion in heaven:

Nor could I rise—with You— Because Your Face

Would put out Jesus’— That New Grace

Just as in girlhood Dickinson found herself lov- ing the world too well to declare for Christ during the Calvinist REVIVALS that regularly swept through

AMHERST, so in this poem she rejects Jesus’ glory

as an inferior substitute for her earthly lover’s. The lines resonate with a brief letter she sent, around 1877, to the radiantly handsome Bowles, possibly the beloved of this poem, whose relentless social

activism in spite of ill health endowed him for her with an aura of saintliness. Apparently acknowl- edging the receipt of a photograph, she writes, “You have the most triumphant Face out of Paradise— probably because you are there constantly, instead of ultimately—” (L 489). As Farr notes, the vision of the lover’s countenance eclipsing Christ’s recurs in the image patterns of the letters and poems Dickinson wrote to the man she called “Master.” Without the radiance of her beloved (“Except that You than He / Shone closer by—”), she continues, she would be homesick in heaven. Homesickness, we should note, tormented the homebound Dick- inson, whether on earth or in heaven, as she wrote, in 1862: “I never felt at Home—Below—/ And in the Handsome skies / I shall not feel at Home—I know—/ I don’t like Paradise—” (Fr 437). Here, she is homesick for the “Life that never could be, an ordinary, domestic life infused with the radiance of his love” (Wolff, Life 421).

Then, too, she writes in stanzas 8 and 9, Judg- ment would come between them, since, although the beloved tried to serve Heaven, she, as his idola- ter, could not:

Because You saturated sight— And I had no more eyes For sordid excellence As Paradise

Dickinson’s heresy in dismissing God’s gift of eternal life as “sordid” is consistent with “her life- long recognition that she can love people (her friends, Sue, Master) more than God” (Passion, 126). Farr sees another version of this stance in the famous letter Dickinson sent to her future sister- in-law, SUSAN HUNTINGTON GILBERT (DICKINSON),

that begins, “Sue—you can go or stay—” (L 173, about 1854), in which she “opposes to the idea of religion the burning reality of love. Dickinson imag- ines herself on the . . . Day of Judgment claimed by the Devil . . . while Sue, who loved Jesus Christ, is saved” (124).

Reading the next two stanzas, in which the speaker considers the possibilities that she might be saved and he lost, or vice versa, Pollak accuses the speaker of not “understanding the relationship between the attempt to serve heaven, in which

she claims not to have participated, and the end product, grace” (Anxiety of Gender, 184). But Dickinson understood the relationship very well and is only denying her prospects for happiness in the next life from every conceivable perspective. The Heaven and Hell of the self are in any case what concern her, as she tells us when she writes that, if he were saved and she “condemned to be / Where You were not / That self—were Hell to me—.”

In the final stanza, two lines longer than the others, as if to imitate the distance separating them, she drops the negatives and says not only what can happen, but also what must: “So we must meet apart—.” Farr notes that “To ‘meet apart with door ajar’ is a concept taken from the very pattern of Dickinson’s daily life in 1862. She met people behind doorways; she met them in letters; she met them by sending herself in spirit to their rooms” (Passion, 308). Within the space of the final stanza, the slender opening of the “Door ajar” between the lovers expands into three immensities: Ocean, Prayer, and “that White Sustenance—/ Despair—.” Note how meaning is reinforced by sound in the progression from “Door ajar” to “Oceans are,” to “Prayer,” to “Despair,” and how the very sounds of the word Prayer are reconstituted in the word Despair. For Dickinson, prayer was most often associated with the despair of knowing God is not listening, or, if listening, not caring.

In what sense does despair sustain her? Scholar Gary Stonum suggests that despair “can both sus- tain itself and be sustained by the lovers. In con- trast to a consuming and apocalyptic presence, it can be prolonged without requiring the parties to be consumed” (Dickinson Sublime, 161). Despair sustains Dickinson’s art as well, providing the emo- tional core of her love poetry. The sustenance it offers is White, a word she associated with death but also with the purity and integrity of her calling as a poet.

See also “IFIMAYHAVEIT, WHENIT’SDEAD,” “NOT INTHIS WORLDTOSEEHISFACE—,” “OF COURSE—I PRAYED—,” “WHEN I HOPED, I RECOLLECT,” MASTER LETTERS, and PURITANHERITAGE.

FURTHER READING

Sharon Cameron, “The Dialectic of Rage,” in Mod- ern Critical Views, Harold Bloom, ed., 118–121; Judith Farr, Passion, 124–125, 306–308; Vivian R. Pollak, Anxiety of Gender, 181–184 Gary Lee Sto- num, Dickinson Sublime, 160–161; Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 417–423.

“I can wade Grief—” (1862)

(Fr 312, J 252)

In this exploration of her own and the human capacity to bear grief and joy Dickinson begins and ends with a boast. Grief is her natural element, she tells us; she is a regular athlete when it comes to traversing “Whole Pools of it”—and keeping her head above water. We can interpret this as a rev- elation of a perverse innate disposition that made her more comfortable when she was miserable; but it may also be seen as a simple statement of fact. For, by the time she wrote this poem, at age 32, Dickinson had experienced—and survived—the deaths of such intimates as her close friend SOPHIA

HOLLAND, and her mentors LEONARD HUMPHREY

and BENJAMIN FRANKLIN NEWTON, as well as the deaths of neighbors and acquaintances, many of whom were young. She had also experienced the loss or waning of once intense friendships. Although shaken by these griefs, she had learned to live with them. But joy is a dizzying, unaccustomed medium for her. If grief is water, joy is air, a gust of wind whose “least push” makes her drunk and throws her off balance. Breezily defending herself against the smiles of the watching pebbles, she tells us it was only “the New Liquor” of joy that has affected her. Whatever new joy in her life sparked these words, there is no hint of it in the actual poem. This is deeply characteristic of her poems, which tell “all the truth” of her inner experience, without revealing the external circumstances involved. (See “TELLALLTHE TRUTH BUTTELL IT SLANT”). Thus, the “New Liquor” can stand for all and any joys. Dickinson speaks of herself as intoxicated in other poems, for example, in “I TASTEA LIQUOR NEVER

BREWED—,” in which she appears in the throes of

intense spiritual and emotional highs. She was, in fact, quite adept at “wading” her own particular brand of ecstasy, whether exultation in nature, in the writing of poems, or simply in the mystery of being alive.

In the lighthearted immediacy of the last two lines of stanza 1, we can feel the poet stepping off, however uncertainly, into a state of inebriated joy. But, along with the use of the first person, stanza 2 drops the theme of intoxication altogether. Indeed, in its shift of tone and focus, stanza 2 might be a separate poem altogether. There are, however, inti- mate connections between the poem’s two halves. Dickinson believed in “leaving the soul ajar,” that is, letting the experience she was exploring take her where it would. The fact that her poems often go in unexpected directions is part of their complexity and power.

Thus, in stanza 2, she generalizes from the personal, but universalized, experience of stanza 1. Joy is left behind, the tone becomes oracular and Pain is the subject. “Power is only Pain—/ Stranded—thro’ Discipline,” she proclaims, in one of her most famous and central statements. The first part of this borders on the common wisdom that hardship survived can strengthen the suf- ferer. But in the second half she develops this idea in a new direction. Stranded, in the edition of the dictionary Dickinson used, is defined as “driven on shore . . . as a ship, stranded at high water.” The image is thus one of isolation and immobil- ity. In this context, the stranding is a positive state: The ship of pain is under control. Unlike wobbly, out-of-control joy, it is anchored by the hanging weights of discipline. Through the will of the sufferer, it can be transformed into power—to endure or even to triumph through the alchemy of poetry.

In a final shift of imagery, the poet sees “Balm”— her term for healing pleasure—as a weakening gift, reducing Giants to mere men. In contrast, burdens create the strength to bear them. Himmaleh is a variant spelling of Himalayas, the Tibetan moun- tain range; it is the form Dickinson would have seen in S. Augustus Mitchell’s System of Modern Geography, the text used at the MOUNT HOLYOKE

FEMALE SEMINARY, which she attended. In a play

of words that reinforces her meaning, she personi- fies Himmaleh as “Him,” thereby shrinking both the word and the mountain range it refers to, making it something manageable:

Give Himmaleh— They’ll carry—Him!

“Him,” also, of course, suggests that the gigantic burden carried is a man. This suspicion is height- ened if we know that Dickinson wrote another poem that same year in which Himmaleh is person- ified: “The Himmaleh was known to stoop/ Unto the Daisy low—” (Fr 460, J 481, 1862). Daisy was the name she used for herself in her letters to SAMUEL BOWLES, whom many scholars believe to

be the beloved man she called Master. But any simple identification of Bowles with Himmaleh is ruled out by the fact that, in this poem, Dickinson makes the mountain range feminine: “Where Tent by Tent—Her Universe/ Hung Out it’s Flags of Snow—” a possible allusion to the powerful woman she loved, her sister-in-law, SUSAN HUNTINGTON

GILBERT DICKINSON. The reader determined to nail

Dickinson’s poems firmly to the facts of her biogra- phy repeatedly encounters this kind of ambiguity.

Thus, this poem, in which the speaker at first appears to be taking her first unsteady steps under the influence of joy turns into an affirmation and celebration of the feats that pain makes possible. It belongs to that group of Dickinson’s poems, prominently including “We never know how high we are/ Till we are asked to rise” (Fr 1197, 1871), which vaunt the power of the soul to grow into something mighty when faced with a great challenge.

FURTHER READING

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Emily Dickinson, 214–216.

“I died for Beauty—but was

scarce” (1862) (Fr 448, J 449)

Emily Dickinson came at the experience of death from numerous ingenious directions in her poetry.

In this poem, as in others such as “I HEARDA FLY

BUZZ—WHEN I DIED—” and “BECAUSE I COULDNOT STOPFOR DEATH—,” she asks the reader to accept

the fiction that the speaker has already died. Thus, although “the poem’s voice tells us what silences voice, it is still talking, is after its end relating its end” (Cameron, Lyric Time, 209–210). Dickinson employs this poetic strategy to reach what she calls

CIRCUMFERENCE, the farthest limit of what can be

humanly known, in this case, about the meaning of death.

In this poem, however, the poet has an addi- tional concern: the relationship between human mortality and the ideals of Truth and Beauty. Both of these ideals occupy an exalted place in Dickinson’s universe; both are eternal and exempt from analysis. Thus, she states of beauty in Fr 654: “Beauty be not caused—It is—/ Chase it, and it ceases—/ Chase it not, and it abides—.” In Fr 797, she declares: “The Definition of Beauty is/ That Definition is none—/ Of Heaven, easing Analysis, / Since Heaven and He are one.” And in Fr 1515, she says, “Estranged from Beauty—none can be—/ For Beauty is Infinity—.” As for Truth, “Truth—is as old as God—/ His Twin identity / And will endure as long as He/ A Co-Eternity,” she says in Fr 795; and in Fr 1495, “But Truth, outlasts the Sun—.” Indeed, Truth is so brilliant that it “must dazzle gradually or every man be blind” (Fr 1263).

Although this poem gives no specifics as to how the speaker and her neighbor in the tomb died for Beauty and Truth, Dickinson’s poetry as a whole gives evidence of why these ideals are worth dying for. She asks the reader to take as a given the prin- cipled deaths—and then tries to keep the ideals “alive” in death, through the conversation of the two “kinsmen.” The victory is brief, however; time and death win. The earth silently conquers, wiping out both the speech and the memory or identity (“Our names”) of the speakers:

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night— We talked between the Rooms—