Nor will he like the Dumb
Reveal by sign – a Syllable
Of His Profound To Come –
But when the News be ripe
Presents it in the Act –
Forestalling Preparation –
Escape – or Substitute –
Indifferent to him –
The Dower – as the Doom –
His Office but to execute
Fate's Telegram – to Him –
Fr638 (1863) J672
This poem on the future begins with the straightforward premise that the future is unknowable. It closes, however, with a personified Fate who dictates all that is to come.
While Fate is not a part of mainstream Christian theology today, Dickinson grew up in a Calvinist home, one accepting Calvinism's tenents that salvation and damnation are predestined. Further, Calvin taught that God pre-ordained everything: "All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God" (citation on Wikipedia, "Predestination in Calvinism").
Once again Dickinson employs the sort of legal diction that she would have heard from her lawyer father and his friends. The Future, like some loyal factotum, executes his master Fate's instructions upon receipt. The execution is so swift that Future's 'News' is revealed only 'in the Act' itself, which necessarily forestalls 'Preparation – / Escape – or Substitute'. Dickinson's formulation sounds like a legal order for an apprehension of some sort.
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| The Moirai (the Fates) - Alfred Agache (1843–1915) |
The first stanza portrays the essential opaqueness of the future. Despite mindbending relativistic theories of spacetime, in our lived experience, there are no clues, neither spoken nor written, to reveal what will befall. Dickinson refers to this as the Future's "Profound To Come" – a marvelous phrase. The future is certainly profound – it influences us as we prepare for it, as we avert our eyes from it, as we welcome or dread it. Its unfolding lies at the heart of many of humanity's greatest literary and artistic creations. Death and Justice, triumph and defeat are all in the Profound To Come.
The last stanza is slightly chilling. The Future doesn't care about what happens. He is indifferent to our winnings and our losings. I love the alliteration of Dower and Doom – they drop from Dickinson as a matched pair, intrinsically linked. But of course the Future doesn't care. He has but one responsibility – to carry out the dictates of Fate. Dickinson leaves the contemplation of who or what Fate is to her readers' imaginations – or perhaps to the assumptions of her day.
It's a fine distinction, that between Future and Fate: the carriage overturns after losing a wheel and a woman dies. That accident was birthed by the Future into the here and now. But it was Fate who decreed the woman's demise. For Calvinists it is all=powerful God who by definition if not revelation preordains the direction of the cosmos, individual salvation or damnation, and whether the carriage falls.
A beautiful essay. The word "doom" has Anglo-Saxon roots and literally means fate. Like you, I love the juxtaposition of Dower and Doom. Dower has a sense of preparation and Doom, a sense of finality -- like the falling of an axe.
ReplyDeleteThere is also a view in this poem -- as in many of ED's poems -- of a profundity that underlies the ordinary rhythms of life and an indifference of God to the concerns of men. In the poem, she uses an extended metaphor of ordinary business correspondence -- News, Office, Telegram -- to convey a mechanical, execution of fate. God, if he is present at all, is distant and indifferent (the frost decapitates the flower, the blonde assassin hurries on). Death is an ordinary thing in the mind of God, like an office task or housekeeping routine. It is a simple task to send a telegram; the "News" that the telegram reveals -- deaths and casualties on the Civil War battlefield, for example, has meaning only to the living who invest life with meaning.
Your observations about Calvinism are right on point. This reader, growing up in a different time, hears more in the poem than ED likely intended. The poem for me turns on the immediacy of the present moment -- "the Act" -- and how karma, in a mechanical working of cause and effect, brings us irrevocably to the moment when the axe falls.
The poem is almost frightening in its cool contemplation of the workings of Fate. Karma, by contrast, seems reassuringly rational.
Delete“Dower” has the additional connotative baggage of the marriage gift/entitlement. Way to pack stuff in, ED!
ReplyDelete“Dower” has the additional connotative baggage of the marriage gift/entitlement. Way to pack stuff in, ED!
ReplyDeleteAgree with Anon above that this is a beautiful essay. Also agree that the distinction between Future and Fate is fascinating, and puts me in mind of Death and Immortality in “Because I could not stop for Death.” As intimated above, Future is what will happen and Fate is what must happen. In contrast, the relationship between Death and Immortality appears to be more complex for ED. In her letters she substitutes Immortality for Death, but in her poem they are often interpreted as separate entities. Though my personal interpretation of that poem is that Immortality is a characteristic shared by both Death and the deceased, and so is figuratively in the carriage with them.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteYes, I agree with your "almost scary" comment. There is a terrifying quality to this one for me, in that idea that you can't see the future coming and therefore can't truly prepare for it, can't escape from it, and, perhaps most scary, there will be no "Substitute" for the certain losses. I think most of us have a fear of death, and an even greater fear of the death of loved ones. This poem leads us to confront those fears head on.
ReplyDeletePart of me always wants to shy away from poems like this and hurry onto the happier ones, but I see ED being brave and it makes me brave too. I have to grant that a balance between grief and happiness is best in the long run. Too much happiness it seems and you become soft, fragile and cloying. Too much grief and you become hard, unbending and bitter. Emily has such a beautiful balance in her poems between these poles. The transcendent poems would not be nearly so powerful without the harsh-reality poems, and the harsh ones would be bit too depressing alone. One kind keeps you going, the other checks you. Of course many of her best poems contain both at once, the "quartz contentment". To bravely face the fear, as we do here in this poem, is, perhaps, to harden, but the "confident despair" that results makes a safer space for soft joy.
I'm reminded that ED once referred to herself in a letter to her young cousins as the Witch of Endor, the biblical witch who, against Yahweh's wishes, foretells the truth to Saul of his imminent demise. The letter is worth reprinting here:
"I send you my love — which is always new for Rascals like you, and ask instead a little apartment in your Pink Hearts — call it Endor’s Closet.
If ever the World should Frown on you — he is old — you know — give him a kiss, and that will disarm him — if it dont — tell him from me, Who has not found the Heaven — below — Will fail of it above, for Angels rent the House next our’s, Wherever we remove —
Lovingly, Emily”
This has to be the best materteral letter ever written.
wonderful commentary here, d scribe -- per usual! Full of insight, opening up the poem for me. Thank you in particular for the letter -- and 'materteral'!
Delete“Materteral” , the feminine equivalent of “avuncular”, dates only from the mid-19th century. “Avuncular” dates from 1300. (OED)
ReplyDeleteThe mystery for me is the capitalized “Him” that ends the poem:
“His Office but to execute
Fate's Telegram – to Him”
To my knowledge, ED only confers pronoun caps honor (“reverential capitalization”) to God and Reverend Charles Wadsworth. In this case, “Fate’s Telegram” would not be to God, which leaves Wadsworth the implied recipient. Perhaps ED is thinking of the preordained date when she and Wadsworth will meet and marry in Heaven, at least in her imagination.