Where I have lost, I softer tread –

Where I have lost, I softer tread –

I sow sweet flower from garden bed –

I pause above that vanished head

     And mourn.

Whom I have lost, I pious guard

From accent harsh, or ruthless word –

Feeling as if their pillow heard,

     Though stone!

When I have lost, you'll know by this –

A Bonnet black – A dusk surplice –

A little tremor in my voice

     Like this!

Why, I have lost, the people know

Who dressed in frocks of purest snow

Went home a century ago

     Next Bliss!

                                                                            - F 158 (1860)  104

Dickinson here returns to the theme of whether there is any rhyme or reason to life and death. She knows what to do if someone dies, but she’d sure like to understand why they did.

The sibilance of the first stanza reinforces the poet’s “softer tread” near the grave of a departed loved one. The trochees in the second line – “sow sweet flower” – maintain a stately pace in keeping with the mourning. The second stanza has a harsher sound reflecting the poet’s efforts to keep “harsh” or “ruthless” words from being spoken about the beloved dead. “Accent harsh, or ruthless word” in themselves sound harsh. In the third stanza there is “a little tremor” in the fluttering iambs and the alliteration of a “Bonnet black.”  

            The fourth stanza introduces a new idea. In the first three the poet is talking about forms of grieving and how they are noted: flowers and mourning over a grave; defense of the dead one from gossip or ill-will; mourning clothes and getting choked up. But in the fourth, the poet doesn’t have an answer as she had for the Whom, When, and Where of the previous stanzas. This one is the devilish “Why” question: why did he or she have to die? Why now? Why in this manner? Dickinson doesn’t expect a ready answer as the ones who might tell her the answer have been dead for nearly a hundred years.

            Each fourth line is a dimeter that rhymes with the one before it: mourn / stone, and this / Bliss. They work up to the climactic last word, Bliss, which has the effect of implying that all the rest doesn’t matter: not what you wear or how you talk or walk. All that falls away before the contemplation of the “Bliss” that heaven is sure to bring. Oh, but wait! There’s that pesky “why” question. It sort of undermines the idea that pure bliss awaits us all. How blissful can a system be that seems to depend on random deaths? But perhaps I read too  much into this poem.