Until Death touches it
While it and I lap one Air
Dwell in one Blood
Under one Sacrament
Show me Division can split or pare –
Love is like Life – merely longer
Love is like Death, during the Grave
Love is the Fellow of the Resurrection
Scooping up the Dust and chanting "Live"!
F287 (1862) 491
We know the “it” of the first stanza is a great love,
for the poet makes that clear in the second stanza. As long as this love is
“alive,” there is nothing that can come between the narrator and her beloved.
Love laps the same air, shares the same sacrament and even the same blood – it
is the warp and woof of the narrator’s existence.
It
is “like Life,” Dickinson writes – except not so subject to death. It will
endure (and her poetry ensures that). It is, however, also “like Death” – a
line that is not entirely clear to me. Not clear at all, really. I suspect,
though, that Dickinson is getting at the notion that Love isn’t just life but
also the vast stillness and eternality outside of life. The dead await
resurrection within the grave. That timeless disembodied wait must be part of
the still heart of Love.
 |
| William Blake's Creation of Adam. |
I think by "Love is like Death, during the Grave", Emily wanna emphasize on the length of love. She says that "Love is like Life – merely longer." A natural human usually ages 70-80 years. Emily thinks that 70-80 years is a short period for Love. But this man or woman remains dead in his/her grave for thousands or millions of years until his/her resurrection.
ReplyDeletethanks - I think you're right.
DeleteThe Fellow of the Resurrection, and that which follows, may be an allusion to the account of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus when, out of vast grief and love, he bid that Lazarus rise from his tomb and return to life.
ReplyDeleteHere, ED pulls the wool over our eyes.
ReplyDeleteIn the past, I’ve often assumed pronoun gender-switches disguises in ED’s love poems were from feminine to masculine to hide ED’s fundamental lesbian orientation. However, ED’s marriage poems and Master Letters make more sense if we infer a masculine gender, and some modern commenters have posited that ED’s fundamental sexual orientation was bisexual.
One could argue that if we accept that sexual descriptors can include physical and/or emotional love, including traditional and/or symbolic marriage, that ED was trisexual, to include God, or even quadrisexual, to include Death. Maybe ED’s sexual orientation cannot be described with one word.
In any case, remember ED’s draft of ML3? Here’s that saucy/sassy/cheeky first paragraph (brackets and parentheses are ED’s, not mine):
“Oh, did I offend it - [Did'nt it want me to tell it the truth] Daisy -Daisy-offend it-who bends her smaller life to his (it's) meeker (lower) every day - who only asks - a task- something to do
for love of it - some little way she cannot guess to make that master glad -”
Yup, in Stanza 1 of this poem ED has switched pronouns, this time from masculine to neuter. What she implied but didn’t say:
While he is alive
Until Death touches him
While he and I lap one Air
Dwell in one Blood
Under one Sacrament
Show me Division can split or pare –
If we interpret “it” as “Love”, the first stanza makes no sense:
While Love is alive
Until Death touches Love
While Love and I lap one Air
Dwell in one Blood
Under one Sacrament
Show me Division can split or pare –
Of course, my candidate for “ït/him” is Charles Wadsworth.