You left me – Sire – two Legacies –

You left me – Sire – two Legacies –
A Legacy of Love
A Heavenly Father would suffice
Had He the offer of –

You left me Boundaries of Pain –
Capacious as the Sea –
Between Eternity and Time –
Your Consciousness – and me –


   -F713, J644, Fascicle 33, 1863



                               


The "Eternity" from Dickinson's original MS of this poem is a work of art all its own. It is well worth reading Dickinson's poems in the original, as it can add so much to the experience. Look at the majesty of that E;  the curve of that t, the top of which flows down the ages of the word to cross that second smaller t; the y at the end of the word bolstering it from behind and giving it that subtle underline. There is also that strange break in the middle of the word between the r and the n. She seems to have picked up her pen there for a moment, as if to break eternity in two. And how about that blot of a dot for the i? It really marks the spot. If you look close it looks like she dotted it thrice, each dot making a visceral point. Dot dot dot.

Alright, onto the poem. I was dismissive with this one at first. More of the same I thought. You think I would've learned by now to never second guess Dickinson though. The more I dove into this poem, the more inspired I found it to be. 

These emotionally intense love poems are a lot, especially when you read one after another after another. How does Emily keep it up? I admire her stamina, but stamina to what end? How many weeks, months, years has Emily been feeling this level of intensity? 

But this poem seems too perfect to signal unbearable pain. I think this is why I was originally put off. There are two nearly perfectly symmetrical iambic pentameter quatrains with uncharacteristically perfect end rhyme. Each stanza begins neatly with “You left me.”

If you turned this poem on its side it would resemble a double flame, flame to flame, or better yet, a double crown, Sire to Sire. (Hmm. Dickinson talks about double-sided Monarchs elsewhere in this fascicle. See F709 for example.)

Though the feeling of "You left me" may be brutal in real life, in a highly formalized poem like this it can seem maudlin. “You left me. You left me. Woe is me.” This poem plays itself out in that space between the real and the idealized.

This poem is very pretty, to the ear and to the eye. A little too pretty. On purpose? 

Shakespeare’s sonnets were also ornately over the top. But as with Shakespeare, we begin to see the nuances flower from within the confines of the structure. Let's dive into the subtleties.

    A Legacy of Love
    A Heavenly Father would suffice
    Had He the offer of –

The first meaning I get from these lines is, “The love you left behind as a legacy for me would be enough for God, if that’s who was entertaining the offer. But He's not, I am!” This reads to me like a barb directed at the reverend Charles Wadsworth. 

But if you squint and look again you can see the a double meaning. The lines may also mean something like this, “You left me a legacy of love, Sire. A heavenly father would suffice (for me) if only He could offer me the same thing that you do.”

She’s lost her man to his faith, and it's not a faith she shares. The Heaven he’s aiming toward doesn't work for her. This is ironic because Heaven, in her opinion, isn't as good as the man. You can see other examples of these sentiments in F706:

They’d judge Us – How –
For You – served Heaven – You know,
Or sought to –
I could not –

Because You saturated Sight –
And I had no more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

And were You lost, I would be –
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame –

And were You – saved –
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not –
That self – were Hell to Me –

The wonder is that here, just a few poems later, Dickinson has, through an act of extreme poetic compression, put these ideas into just a few lines.

The subtleties pick up in the second stanza. How about the plural in "Boundaries of pain"? If someone left you a boundary of pain, that would be okay. At least it's not without boundaries. It’s not boundless pain. But what if someone leaves you boundaries of pain? That plural leaves the idea of openness... open. You could have two boundaries or you could have a million. You don’t know where that boundary ends, what the boundary of the boundary is. It’s painfully open. Perhaps you are feeling a different boundary to that pain every day. But that is also promising. That means some days it is less. Is the pain lessening a bit overall? It seems to be.

Perhaps that’s why she is beginning to prettify the poems up? Poetry is winning. Form is overtaking the content. (Emily is a master of this. See F372, the famous poem beginning "After great pain a formal feeling comes,” a poem which is ABOUT form and the way form heals. That poem begins in perfect meter, then stumbles and breaks into chaotic meter and then reforms again in perfect lockstep.) The form is firmly in control in this poem. No slant rhymes indicating something is "off."

Those boundaries are still sea-sized though. Her pain is oscillating between Eternity (aching for it) and (Time) mortality. The stakes are high. And how does the poem end? The boundary, it turns out, is also between consciousness and me. To help us understand what Emily means by consciousness we turn to earlier poems. Especially helpful here is this stanza from F709.

“But since Myself — assault Me —
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?”

These lines, from just a few poems back chronologically, suggest that if you subjugate consciousness, you are also stopping the assault from Me. "Me" is complicated because it signifies "Us," as in I am you, and you are me. So I think Emily is saying something like - there is a boundary between Me and Consciousness because I am only myself when I am with you. Otherwise I am a separate being, a fraction, a lone consciousness.

So although Dickinson wraps this poem up in an awfully pretty bow, when you unwrap it you get an endless proliferation of meaning. Because of the bottomless nature of eternity and Me-ness, we can endlessly contend with this poem, and with its intimations of the beloved, from the sharply separate point view of a consciousness stuck in time.


/)dam Wade l)eGraff