Let Us play Yesterday –

Let Us play Yesterday –
I – the Girl at school –
You – and Eternity – the
Untold Tale –

Easing my famine
At my Lexicon –
Logarithm – had I – for Drink –
’Twas a dry Wine –

Somewhat different – must be –
Dreams tint the Sleep –
Cunning Reds of Morning
Make the Blind – leap –

Still at the Egg-life –
Chafing the Shell –
When you troubled the Ellipse –
And the Bird fell –

Manacles be dim – they say –
To the new Free –
Liberty – Commoner –
Never could – to me –

’Twas my last gratitude
When I slept – at night –
’Twas the first Miracle
Let in – with Light –

Can the Lark resume the Shell –
Easier – for the Sky –
Wouldn’t Bonds hurt more
Than Yesterday?

Wouldn’t Dungeons sorer grate
On the Man – free –
Just long enough to taste
Then – doomed new –

God of the Manacle
As of the Free –
Take not my Liberty
Away from Me.


    -F754, J728, fascicle 36, 1863

You are in school. It's boring. Someone comes along and suddenly there's a spark, one that school studies could never give you. Pretty soon you are on fire. Now you can never go back to your boring and studious life. If you did, the status quo would be worse than before, because now you have tasted something better. So you are asking, pleading, praying, for the lover to stay.

That's the basic idea for this poem. But the poem, just like its subject matter, takes you beyond the basic, just as a new found love might.

Let us play Yesterday –
I – the Girl at school –
You – and Eternity – the
Untold Tale –

The compression of this first line lets you take it a few different ways. It could be looking backwards: let us play a game of pretending we are young, which we will call Yesterday. Or it could be focused on the present: let us play today just like we did yesterday. And, if you flip to the third line, the future is in play too: Eternity. 

In past, present and future, "play" is at the fore. "Play" was also a key player in the last poem in this fascicle. (It is fascinating to watch words and ideas weave in and out of Dickinson's poetry like thread.) In that poem "Play" meant to play false. Here, though, play seems ripe with potential. Play is in play. 

The "Untold Tale" is full of potential too, especially following the word "Eternity." Eternity would be a very loooong story. (Can any story actually be eternal? I watched a soap opera with my mom for 10 years growing up, Days of Our Lives, which is still going on today four decades later. So maybe a tale can go forever? Why not? But it's bound to get boring eventually, no? A shorter tale is sweeter,  poignantly so.) 

The Untold Tale has now, perhaps, been told. You get the feeling that Dickinson is wishing the tale hadn't yet been told. The current tale is sad, as we shall see. This poem is doubly down in the present, because not only has love gone away, but now there is the added burden of knowing what it is we are missing. The poet wants to go back, or at least bring the back forward. But she also knows, perhaps, it can't be. 

I wonder why Dickinson left that "the" hanging there after the third line? It's unusual, as it would make the lines scan better if the "the" began the following line. It's as if that "the" was leading elsewhere.  With another poet we might write something like this off, but with Dickinson aberrations are best seen as purposeful. 

Easing my famine
At my Lexicon –
Logarithm – had I – for Drink –
’Twas a dry Wine –

Before the untold tale began the author had to ease her hunger with her lexicon, which is to say her dictionary. Lexicon is another beloved word of Dickinson's that means more and more with each poem in which it appears. 

There is now a Dickinson Lexicon online that tells you what words meant in Dickinson's time. For the word Lexicon, the Dickinson Lexicon gives us: "word, diction, phrase. Interpreter's guide; vocabulary of a specific group; language of a particular domain. Dictionary; word book; alphabetical arrangement of words with definitions of each. Explanation; translation; key to the significance of something; tool for determining the meaning of words."

But for Emily of course, Lexicon could signify something even more than the word's denotation. Lexicon is a metonym for poetry itself. So when Dickinson says she is easing her famine at her lexicon, this may be taken as a spin on Dickinson's poetics. For what is she doing with this very poem, if not easing her famine with her lexicon? 

Dickinson made a meal of her Lexicon and washed it down with some math. Logarithms are like "dry wine." They are dry, but they can still make you tipsy.  It's worth noting that Emily's schoolgirl friend, Sue Gilbert, whom she was in love with, was a mathematician.  It's also worth noting that Sue had been married to Emily's brother for seven years when this poem was written. I half resist adding these kinds of biographical notes to these commentaries, just because I think these poems should speak for themselves, but sometimes the biographical details are just too good.

Okay, logarithms. Here the Dickinson Lexicon proves quite helpful. "Logarithm: calculation; mathematical function; abridgment of numbers through formulas in trigonometry; [word play on “logos” + “rhythm” or “rhyme”] words; language; lexicon; poetry; metrical verse." 

Aha! Logarithm can also mean the rhythm of words.  When I mentioned this pun to my 14 year old daughter Sofia, she said, "That's so Emily Dickinson of her."

Somewhat different – must be –
Dreams tint the Sleep –
Cunning Reds of Morning
Make the Blind – leap –

First thing I notice here is that "Somewhat." Somewhat usually means just a little, but Dickinson is here talking about a lot, the difference, say, between a thin dry white wine and a full spicy red one. Dreams tint the sleep. (This line reminds me of Wallace Steven's great poem, "Disillusionment of Ten O'clock")

How about "cunning" as a descriptor of a red wine? Try that one out the next time you are describing a good red wine. Red wine in the morning is pretty wild and decadent. It's like that landowner in Canterbury Tales who dips his cake in wine in the morning. 

What else besides wine does red indicate here? Blood, passion, and perhaps, sunrise. 

But wait, who is there with the poet in the morning drinking a red wine? Could this possibly be a morning following an evening of bliss? A bliss to make the Blind leap? The blind aren't just made to see by this red, but to leap!

Still at the Egg-life –

Chafing the Shell –
When you troubled the Ellipse –
And the Bird fell –

Straight from one terrific phrase to another, 

Make the Blind – leap –// Still at the Egg-life –

We are still in the egg-life at school. (I'm reminded of the "ring" in "Because I could not stop for death"..."We passed the School, where Children strove/ At Recess—in the Ring—.")

When do you hatch from the "egg-life?" First love? Well, Sue, if we can believe the letters, was Emily's first real love. 

Chafing the Shell –

Another good line. We push up against our own protective shell, chafing it, wanting out. Chafing is a great verb as it implies an intense and warying process. Meanwhile from the other side of the shell there is another, helping us out by troubling our "ellipse." The other is provoking us to flight.

You can imagine the baby bird trying to get out, while the mother bird taps from the other side to help. It's very sweet, and also, perhaps, a bit scary, because the other is troubling us, troubling our ellipse. Ellipse is great word choice here too. It can mean elliptical, like an egg, but ellipse can also mean "absence." You troubled me into...presence.

And the Bird fell –

There was a leap...and then there was a fall.

I put a tune to this poem, and the way the rhythm of this poem works in song, because of the construction of trochees and iambs in the meter of the lines leading up to this last line, feels as if the bird is indeed falling. There is a build up rhythmically toward a release into that line.  

The bird falling is a great development. You expect "flew," but "fell" is the rhyme for "shell" here. So is the poet falling from the shell or flying? The question is raised. This is what it feels like to fall in love. Are you falling or flying?

’Twas my last gratitude
When I slept – at night –
’Twas the first Miracle
Let in – with Light –

This awakening into love is the poet's last gratitude at night. It is also the miracle, in the morning, that was let in with "Light." The morning is tied in here with birth, with the opening of the shell. Birth, morning, love, gratitude at evening, and, by poetic extension, death, are all tied into this awakening. (How beautiful is it that Sue was still there at the end nursing Dickinson when she died? "'Twas my last gratitude")

Can the Lark resume the Shell –
Easier – for the Sky –
Wouldn’t Bonds hurt more
Than Yesterday?

Dickinson returns to the bird metaphor. She asks, is it easier to go back into your shell after having had the whole sky as yours? You could make an argument that it would be, that at least you got to see the sky for a moment. But Dickinson doesn't think so. She asks a follow up question. Wouldn't bonds hurt more after having tasted freedom? 

Then, to drive the point home she asks a further question,

Wouldn’t Dungeons sorer grate
On the Man – free –
Just long enough to taste
Then – doomed new –

Imagine a man let out of prison, just for a few days. Would he be grateful for those few days of freedom? Or would he be better off if he had never gotten out at all? 

God of the Manacle
As of the Free –
Take not my Liberty
Away from Me.

This last stanza is a hard one to figure. How can God be the God of Manacle and the free? Isn't that a contradiction? Is Dickinson pleading with God to make up his mind here? Or is this plea intended, really, for the liberating lover? God and lover are often conflated in Dickinson's poetry. 

Dickinson could ask a further question here though. Is the blame for this newer and more painful loss of liberty to be placed on the whims of God or lover? Or does the responsibility for this state lay somewhere else? 

It is hard to be alone after having experienced deep soul-stirring passion. I feel this difficulty in so many of Dickinson's poems.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

note: When I was researching this poem, I ended up going down a rabbit hole reading about Mabel Loomis Todd. The love triangle soap opera of Emily's relationship to Sue and Austin was complicated even further when Mabel Loomis Todd came into the picture. Sue and Austin's 20 year old son, Ned, was in love with her. Then Austin, 25 years her senior, fell in love with her, and, much to Sue's chagrin, had a long lasting affair with her. Meanwhile, she had a strange relationship with Emily, whom she played piano for and corresponded with, but never met. Then after Emily died, there was fighting between Todd and the Dickinsons over control of Emily's poems. Todd ended up taking Dickinson's story on a lecture circuit for years, and was instrumental in getting her work published. It must have all really chafed Sue.  It's all much better than Days of Our Lives ever was.