The Grace—Myself—might not obtain—

The Grace—Myself—might not obtain—
Confer upon My flower—
Refracted but a Countenance—
For I—inhabit Her—


     - FR779, J707, Fascicle 37, 1863


This poem is a good example of a phenomenon familiar to readers of Dickinson, the way meaning is unfurled line by line in a way that keeps syntactically shifting. We must first grapple with the intricately processual logic of the poem before we can truly understand it.

The first line of this poem, for instance, says something very different the first time you read it than it does the last time you read it.

The Grace—Myself—might not obtain—

You read that as a discrete unit by itself closed off with that ending dash and it means something like, “I might not ever obtain grace.“

You may ALSO read it as, “Grace may not ever obtain me,” which is a very Dickinsonian twist.

And while both of those readings fit the deeper meaning of the poem, the final sense of this line changes dramatically as we come to understand it is meant with the reader as the object: “You might not obtain my grace, but you can find me reflected in a flower.”

All of these meanings work together to form an overall argument, one that is about transcending our limited ideas of Grace. That flower is where the “I” resides, not in “Grace,” some special favor of God, as we sometimes define it. (“There but for the grace of God go I” has always struck me as an arrogant and odious thing to say.)

It reminds me the Buddha’s great lesson to his acolytes. The story goes that instead of speaking any words, he merely held up a flower.

Likely this poem was sent to its original recipient with an actual flower. There is a whole subcategory of poems by Dickinson that would have originally been sent to the receiver with a flower. Many of these poems describe the flower itself. If anyone out there has time on their hands, a collection of these poems would make a great book, to be sold in florists shops everywhere.

This poem is aligned with the great transcendentalists that Dickinson was surrounded by, Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, to name a few, all of whom were equally apt to see themselves in flowers. Keats, a big influence on Dickinson, had this propensity too. “Here lies one whose name was writ on water” reads the epitaph on his gravestone.

While the reader today has neither Dickinson in the flesh, nor the original flower, we do have the poem, which we can see as a kind of flower made of words. Poetry is, essentially, the flowering of the poet's mind into beautiful language and, like a flower, pressed and preserved between the leaves of a book.

We see Dickinson’s countenance refracted in the poem, which is where we can still find Her Grace. And, really, she is telling us, we can find Her in any flower, just like Whitman tells us to look for him in the grass.

There is also something of the exchange of lovers in this poem. The flower is "possessed" by its giver, who calls it "My" flower, but then, after it is given, the giver inhabits the flower. Who possesses whom? Who belongs to whom? It is in the gift that the possessor becomes one with the possessed.  

        -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Pansies by Joe Brainard