In Ebon Box, when years have flown

In Ebon Box, when years have flown

To reverently peer –

Wiping away the velvet dust

Summers have sprinkled there!

To hold a letter to the light –

Grown Tawny now, with time –

To con the faded syllables

That quickened us like Wine!

Perhaps a Flower's shrivelled cheek

Among its stores to find –

Plucked far away, some morning –

By gallant – mouldering hand!

A curl, perhaps, from foreheads

Our constancy forgot –

Perhaps, an antique trinket –

In vanished fashions set!

And then to lay them quiet back –

And go about its care –

As if the little Ebon Box

Were none of our affair!

                                                - F180 (1860)  169

In this quiet meditation on memory and time, the poet opens a dusty ebony box and lovingly handles the mementos inside: old love letters, a flower from a potential lover, a curl cut from the locks of an old friend, and a bit of old costume jewelry from another friend or a relative. Many of us have such boxes (although mine is cardboard). I wouldn’t be surprised if the contents of women’s memory boxes don’t share some of the treasures of the poet’s. In fact, Dickinson writes as if of an iconic box with the sort of keepsakes that anyone might keep (although I can’t speak for men…). Consequently there is just an unspecified flower, a nameless letter and curl, and a generic trinket. Modern poetry tends to prefer listing specifics.

Keepsake Box

            But Dickinson goes for the pivot and the twist rather than the lingering over tangible objects that come alive through description. Here it is when the momentos are being replaced in the box and life goes on, seemingly unchanged. Yet the memories sparked as the poet “reverently” gazed at her “stores” are an opportunity to think back over life and all the stories that we tell ourselves. The letter that once “quickened us like Wine” may now seem young and naïve. We think about how we have lost naiveté but perhaps gained perspective. We wonder what might have happened had the dead lover lived – and contrast that to how our lives have gone in his absence. And so although the memory box may seem to be no longer “our affair” it in fact represents the sum of our life’s affairs.

            Time permeates the poem. The first line notes the years that “have flown.” Enough dust has settled on the box that it must be wiped away. Old letters are “Tawny” with age, their letters “faded.” There’s a nice contrast there to the ephemeral and quickening “Wine” that does not bear age well.

            The flower is “shriveled” and, alas, the “gallant” hand that picked it is dead and “mouldering” in the grave. The old friend whose curl has been saved is part of the past, as are the “vanished fashions” represented by the trinket. And ebony, of course, is among the hardest and most durably of woods. This little box will outlast the owner. Some future hand will linger over its contents and wonder about the stories behind each object.