It's such a little thing to weep –
So short a thing to sigh –
And yet – by Trades – the size of these
We men and women die!
F220
(1861) 189
While some folks’ lives may be full of derring-do and heroic deeds or
noble self sacrifice that achieves great ends, most of us live, as Thoreau
(Dickinson’s contemporary who died a year after this was poem was written)
wrote in Walden, “lives of quiet desperation.” Shakespeare had MacBeth
say upon learning of his wife’s death:
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
 |
| Girl with a Dead Canary Jean-Baptiste Greuze |
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time.
Here, the poet measures lifetimes by such “little” and “short” things as
weeping and sighing. These are the “Trades” – or trade goods – that mark the
passage of our days. And then we die! Happy thought! Although the poet might
have chosen happier words such as “laugh” or “smile,” and we know that
Dickinson was apt to laugh and smile (in addition to tears and sighs), she was
not out of tune with the literary conventions of her time where women were
considered the dainty sex, sentimental and liable to swoon or faint at any small shock – let alone weep or sigh.
Another
of Dickinson’s contemporaries, Walt Whitman, sounded the polar opposite tone as
he celebrated himself and all things wild and manly and strong. He was as far
from Puritan Amherst as could be:
I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
The poem is a simply ballad-style quatrain
I read the same theme from Buddhism and Judaism teaching. Life is suffering and the meanings to decrease is to detach. As much, “ it also shall pass.”
ReplyDeleteYes, but it's a hard lesson.
DeleteED literally says, “By exchanges the size of weeps and sighs / we men and women die.” For once, she’s unambiguous; she says and means “die”, not “live”. Smiles and laughs fuel life, weeps and sighs, death. Walk on the sunny side of the street.
ReplyDeletePlease pardon the peregrination, but could ED’s four-line poem be a terse riff off Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnet, 'The world is too much with us; late and soon', perhaps a comment on her own burdened relationship with Sue?
ReplyDeleteThe world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. —Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
I don't know. Wordsworth's poem seems more about getting and spending and other quotidian cares versus the magnificence of nature and the grand myths it engenders.
DeleteI was trying to put a thin chain into a small hole of a shell, only to find myself sighing and crying, it was just barely too big, the chain. This made me suddenly remember dear Emily and this poem, mixed in with the word 'Circumference' from another poem. It finally made sense!
ReplyDelete