My Portion is Defeat – today –

My Portion is Defeat – today –
A paler luck than Victory –
Less Paeans – fewer Bells –
The Drums dont follow Me –
with tunes –
Defeat – a +somewhat slower –
means –
More +Arduous than Balls –

Tis populous with Bone
and stain –
And Men too straight to
+ stoop again –
And Piles of solid Moan –
And Chips of Blank – in
Boyish Eyes –
And + scraps of Prayer –
And Death’s surprise,
Stamped visible – in stone –

There’s +somewhat prouder,
Over there –
The Trumpets tell it to
the Air –
How different Victory
To Him who has it – and
the One
Who to have had it,
would have been
Contenteder – to die –

+something dumber + difficult –

+bend +shreds + something

    -F704, J639, Fascicle 33, 1863

This poem takes a surprising turn. Nearly every poem in the last few fascicles seems to be dealing with the aftermath of a lover’s absence, full of an anguished passion which is wrung out in metaphor after metaphor. So when this one starts out by claiming “My Portion is Defeat – today –”, you think it is one more poem bemoaning the absence of He who brings the fire, He who is full of grace, He with eyes like heaven. And perhaps it is.

In the next line the pivotal word “Victory” leads us to see war as the metaphor for whatever defeat is in question for the poet. This defeat feels, to the poet, as brutal and terrible as war: pure hell. Is this an exaggeration? Perhaps, but it makes its point. 

This is problematic. On one hand it elevates the emotional impact of whatever defeat the poet is feeling. On the other hand doesn't it belittle the fate of the soldiers by comparing it to a personal defeat?

But something strange happens. The problem works itself out. In the course of this poem, as Dickinson goes on to describe the horrors of war, like the “solid pile of moan” and “chips of blank in boyish eyes”, it swerves to become more about the poor soldiers than the poet. It’s as if the poet, who is admitting that she is so miserable she’d rather be dead, is now, because of her plight, able to truly sympathize with the soldiers. The poem starts out in self-pity, but as the metaphor gets extended there is a transition until finally the metaphor itself begins to become the subject. The poet moves from pitying herself to pitying the civil war soldiers who are dying en masse as this poem is being written, including some of Emily's own friends.

It reminds me in this way of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy”, in which Plath is ostensibly expressing anger about her German father, but does this by comparing her father with a Nazi soldier. Plath's poem was controversial, as some saw it as sensational and opportunistic  (The gall of comparing your own privileged life to the horrors of the holocaust!) I can understand this, but I would argue that you can justify Plath’s move as a way of shedding light on domestic abuse, and, conversely, the parental abuse hinted at in poem sheds light on Nazi mentality too.

This poem has a bit of that same problem. In Dickinson’s poem though I feel as if she channels her suffering into empathy. Note that the poem never returns to its initial focus on “me.” In the end the pronoun “me” has been turned into “one.” It has been depersonalized. The soldier and the poet, through the alchemy of the poem, have become “one”.

Let's go through the poem.

First stanza: My portion is defeat today. I didn’t get as lucky as the victor did. For me there are less songs of triumph (paeans), less ringing of bells, and no marching drums at all. To be defeated is more difficult than death by bullets (balls).

Second stanza: Defeat is populated with the bones of soldiers and the stain of blood, with dead bodies so stiff they can no longer stoop, with piles of men moaning in pure agony, with dead boys who now have blank chips for eyes. (“chips” -what a word choice.) The dead boys are holding scraps of prayer, perhaps bible pages. (This is as biting a line about faith as Dickinson has yet written.) And then there is that final haunting image; the way the faces of the dead still show the surprise of death, as if the soldiers were statues carved in stone.

Third stanza: Those over there on the victorious side are “somewhat” prouder than the defeated are. Dickinson provides “something” as an alternative word for “somewhat” here, but I think “somewhat” is much stronger, because it implies that there is still SOME pride in defeat. There is still a minor victory. This is a subtle turning point in the poem and sets up the next lines. "Over there –/ The Trumpets tell it to the Air – " The trumpets of the winners tell their victory to the air. The trumpets are not being heard by anything but “air” though, implying that the victory is as empty as air. Still, empty as it may be, victory is still better, because it doesn’t make you wish you were dead. The defeated soldier would rather have died in battle than lost a cause he was willing to give his life for. And here we are reminded of the stakes for the poet too. She would rather be dead than to have lived without gaining the thing she would have given her entire being for.

This poem, which is, at the onset, about the poet, turns out to be one of the great anti-war poems through sheer force of Dickinson’s imagery.

There is also a unique and effective rhyme scheme and rhythmic structure. Read the poem and listen to it as if there were marching drums underlining it, with a pause in the beat of the snare at every dash. 

-/)dam Wade l)eGraff