As if the Sea should part

As if the Sea should part
And show a further Sea —
And that — a further — and the Three
But a presumption be —

Of Periods of Seas —
Unvisited of Shores —
Themselves the Verge of Seas to be —
Eternity — is Those —

      -F720, J695, Fascicle 35, 1863


This poem is trippy, with its image of seas parting to reveal more seas parting to reveal more seas, on and on. It's an exhaustion of revelations, each showing the same thing as the last. The idea in the first line is already funny. The poem begins with the conjunction "as if," but the analogy presented is suspect, isn't it? Seas don’t part. Not unless you are an old testament God. We are already in the area of the impossible. So when we get to the sea being revealed beneath the parted sea, it is like the surreal nonsense of Lewis Carroll. Below everything is more of everything. To me this is like the child contemplating eternity, realizing there can never not be a beginning before the beginning, nor an end to the end, getting a headache from thinking about it and then it abandoning it altogether for some milk and cookies.

In the first stanza you get one Sea leading to two and then three (each increasingly ludicrous, an expansion of expansiveness) until you arrive at what you presume to be a whole period of Seas. "But a presumption be —/ Of Periods of Seas —" A "presumption” is not the same as knowledge, since you can never really know how far those Periods of seas go. 

Period has a nice doubleness here. It’s a contranym, a word that means two opposite things. It means “stop,” as in a sentence ending, or it can also be an ongoing period of time, one that will end, perhaps, but is indefinite and ongoing for the foreseeable future. (Dickinson was fond of contranyms. See a further discussion of Dickinson’s use of contranyms here). 

We can’t ever see the seas beneath the seas beneath the seas though, because we are here on shore. Eternity is likened here to the verge of the seas we will never see. "Period" in this poem is a key word. It signals stop, it intimates staying on shore. The Eternal may be seductive, but why would we move off of the shore and into empty endlessness? But to what end? Sometimes Eternity is a positive word in Dickinson, but sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is as far removed from the present as can be. 

It is quite possible that I am adding a negative dimension to this vision of Eternity that the poem doesn't support. But I can't see anything on the other side of those parting seas luring me in, just more parting. 

  -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S.

The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: Xiii

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were 

behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. 

For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter 

that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive. 

Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise 

into the seamless life proclaimed in your song. 

Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days, 

be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang. 

 Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin, 

the infinite source of your own most intense vibration, 

so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent. 

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb 

creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,

 joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count. 

    -Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell