The power to be true to You,
Until upon my face
The Judgment push his Picture —
Presumptuous of Your Place —
Of This — Could Man deprive Me —
Himself — the Heaven excel —
Whose invitation — Yours reduced
Until it showed too small —
-F699, J464, Fascicle 32, 1863
This is the last poem of fascicle 32. “Fascicle" is the name that Emily Dickinson's early editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, gave to the homemade manuscript books into which Dickinson copied her poems. Dickinson constructed the fascicles by writing poems onto sheets of standard stationery already folded in two to create two leaves (four pages). She then stacked several such sheets on top of each other, made two holes in the left margin through the stack, and threaded string through the holes and tied the sheets together.
Ah, I would love to hold one of Emily's fascicles in hand.
It is fascinating to look at how each fascicle hangs together, how the poems within each one appear to be in conversation with one another. Fascicle 32 is a prime example.
In a similar manner, the line “We perish, though we reign” from F693 is ironic if you read the poem in context. Though I still WANT to read it as, instead, transcendent.
The 20th and penultimate poem in the fascicle, the one before this one, says, "I live with him here in the eternal now, be Judgment what it may." (Judgment be damned! Haha.) The 4th time the word "Judgment" is invoked in this fascicle.
This poem, the fifth one to use the word "Judgment" and the final poem of the fascicle, says something like, no man has the power to shake my fidelity to my love. Only Judgment (death) can reduce it. "The Judgment push his Picture — Presumptuous of Your Place —" Note the small "h" used here for "his", a very small detail that speaks volumes.
21 poems in fascicle 32, all hovering around heaven’s absence of presence and earth’s presence of absence.
Although it feels reductive to read these poems as directed toward Charles Wadsworth, it’s hard not to see them in this light when reading them as a whole. (And Larry B's commentary throughout the posts on this fascicle are persuasive here). It certainly seems as if there is an argument being made for an earthly present love to a man who seems to be more worried about Judgment in heaven. Moreover, these arguments use biblical language, the language that Wadsworth, a Presbyterian Minister, was steeped in, against itself.
For instance, the poem that begins and the poem that ends this fascicle are both thematically about death and judgment. In fact the word or idea of “Judgment” appears in at least 7 of the 21 poems in fascicle 32. This gives some credence to the idea that Dickinson wasn’t just collecting her poems randomly in these fascicles, but making unified discrete collections of poems.
Several of the poems in the fascicle form a kind of polemic about renouncing an unknowable, and possibly non-existent, heavenly love for an earthly love here and now.
There are a few poems that don't fit this theme, at least not in an obvious way. For instance, stitched into this narrative there is another narrative about sewing and patchwork. Seeing as how these fascicles are stitched together, and that sewing may be seen as a metaphor for poetry, you might say that the fascicle itself forms a kind of patchwork of sorts.
Some of the poems, when re-read within the context of the entire fascicle, change tone, and therefore meaning. The 13th poem in this fascicle, for example, the one about the holy trinity ("The Jehovahs") being the only ones that are able to detect sorrow, and, further, not blab about it, reads as sincere on its own, but appears closer to sarcasm to me, or maybe defeat, when read in the context of the rest of the fascicle.
Several of the poems in the fascicle form a kind of polemic about renouncing an unknowable, and possibly non-existent, heavenly love for an earthly love here and now.
There are a few poems that don't fit this theme, at least not in an obvious way. For instance, stitched into this narrative there is another narrative about sewing and patchwork. Seeing as how these fascicles are stitched together, and that sewing may be seen as a metaphor for poetry, you might say that the fascicle itself forms a kind of patchwork of sorts.
Some of the poems, when re-read within the context of the entire fascicle, change tone, and therefore meaning. The 13th poem in this fascicle, for example, the one about the holy trinity ("The Jehovahs") being the only ones that are able to detect sorrow, and, further, not blab about it, reads as sincere on its own, but appears closer to sarcasm to me, or maybe defeat, when read in the context of the rest of the fascicle.
In a similar manner, the line “We perish, though we reign” from F693 is ironic if you read the poem in context. Though I still WANT to read it as, instead, transcendent.
The 20th and penultimate poem in the fascicle, the one before this one, says, "I live with him here in the eternal now, be Judgment what it may." (Judgment be damned! Haha.) The 4th time the word "Judgment" is invoked in this fascicle.
This poem, the fifth one to use the word "Judgment" and the final poem of the fascicle, says something like, no man has the power to shake my fidelity to my love. Only Judgment (death) can reduce it. "The Judgment push his Picture — Presumptuous of Your Place —" Note the small "h" used here for "his", a very small detail that speaks volumes.
21 poems in fascicle 32, all hovering around heaven’s absence of presence and earth’s presence of absence.
Although it feels reductive to read these poems as directed toward Charles Wadsworth, it’s hard not to see them in this light when reading them as a whole. (And Larry B's commentary throughout the posts on this fascicle are persuasive here). It certainly seems as if there is an argument being made for an earthly present love to a man who seems to be more worried about Judgment in heaven. Moreover, these arguments use biblical language, the language that Wadsworth, a Presbyterian Minister, was steeped in, against itself.
On one hand I don't want to get too caught up in this biographical take. If too much is made of it, then it takes away from the poems' ability, as Susan Kornfeld beautifully puts it, to bloom within the reader. But, on the other hand, it’s a juicy story! It’s a very similar narrative in that way to the stellar second season of the TV series “Fleabag”, in which Fleabag and a priest fall in love. If you haven't watched that show, I recommend watching it, and then come back and read these poems again.
But maybe you don't have to choose between the biographical and the personal. The poems can be both. They make an endlessly fascinating and psychologically intricate love story when read biographically, but they also have the ability to take the reader into Emily's side of that story, an argument for the reader's sake too, to be enraptured in the the present, heartbreak and all.
-/)dam Wade l)eGraff
Your explication is a summation masterpiece, d scribe, no other way to say it. ED's genius just keeps climbing; the more we climb her vine, the more we find. Bloom's (1994) estimation of Dickinson’s ‘The Tint I cannot take — is best —’ (F696) seemed impossible hyperbole until I read your comments on F699 and Fascicle 32’s unity:
ReplyDelete“Dickinson’s “Tint I cannot take” poem knows, as no other poem in her century knows, that we are always besieged by perspectives. Dickinson’s entire art at its outer limits, as in this poem, is to think and write her way out of that siege. Yet she knows that we are governed by the contingency of living within the primordial poem of our precursors’ perspectives. Nietzsche’s Will to Power aphorisms, written a generation after Dickinson’s major phase, can be read as comments on "The Tint I cannot take—is best.”
“The entire emphasis of Dickinson’s “Tint” poem is on what cannot be taken, an ungraspable secret, a trope or metaphor not to be expressed. The famous closing line, “another way—to see—” has been weakly misread by feminist critics as a gendered alternative of vision. But this is a very difficult poem, as tough as it is distinguished, and it will yield only to preternaturally close reading, not to ideology or polemical zeal, however benign in social purpose. We confront, at the height of her powers, the best mind to appear among Western poets in nearly four centuries. Whatever our own policies or purposes, we must be very wary not to confuse our stances with hers.”
We all know whom Bloom considered the "best poet mind" in 1594.
Bloom, Harold. 1994. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (pp. 284-288). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Thanks for the kind words Larry. You give me heart. Also thanks for the Bloom, "Dickinson’s entire art...is to think and write her way out of that siege (of perspectives)." This is very helpful I think when working to understand Dickinson's poetry.
DeleteI'm not sure it was necessary to specifically call out feminists critics, (it belies Bloom's own "perspective" perhaps), but otherwise these are wise words to keep in mind.
An interpretation of F699, ‘The power to be true to You’:
ReplyDeleteI have the strength to be true to You, Charles Wadsworth
Until in my face
Judgmental God pushes His Picture -
Presumptuous of Your Place -
Of God – Could Wadsworth deprive Me? -
Wadsworth - exceeds Heaven –
His invitation - Reduced Yours, God,
Until yours seemed too small.
An interesting interpretation, thank you. I was especially struck by your line, "21 poems in fascicle 32, all hovering around heaven’s absence of presence and earth’s presence of absence." Artfully put!
ReplyDeleteBut I'm struggling to make sense of the poem using the interpretation that the poem essentially states that "no man has the power to shake my fidelity to my love." By that reading, wouldn't the "You" in the first line need to be her earthly love (Wadsworth or someone else), and not God/divine figure? I just can't make that interpretation scan with the rest of the poem.
I'm wondering if it would make more sense in the context of the poem if the "You" in the first stanza (and the "Yours" in the second) were to refer to God. Then "Judgment" would be more like a Death presence, and the referent for the "This" at the beginning of the second stanza becomes "the power to be true to God." And thus the second stanza wonders, could a man (Wadsworth or some earthly love) excel this fidelity I have to God/this other world?
The poem would then still seem to be about earthly/divine or present/absent love (as you posit), but instead of making an assertion of the speaker's devotion to their (earthly) love, it provokes a question about the possible supercession of divine love by an earthly one.
Hope that makes sense. Thank you very much for your work on this blog.
I agree that you could read this poem this way and I like your idea that it "provokes a question". I'm basing my reading on the poems surrounding this one. See my comments on F705 for more of this.
Delete