They ask but our Delight—

They ask but our Delight—
The Darlings of the Soil
And grant us all their Countenance
For a penurious smile.


     -F908, J868, sheet 9, 1865


Emily Dickinson loved flowers. She famously grew them both indoors and out, including a few rare ones that were notoriously difficult to maintain. Sometimes these flowers accompanied poems she would send to her friends. These poems were often about the flowers themselves. My guess is that this poem was of that nature.

Flowers are perfects hosts. They ask nothing of us, except that we delight in them. That's not asking much, just that we accept the gift. After all, they give us all of their beauty, all of their “countenance.” But we, poor creatures that we are, can barely manage a “penurious smile” in return for all of this providence. The least we can do is give our full countenance back to the flowers, give as good as we get.

That notion itself is enough to make this a great poem. It reminds me of the ancient Sufi poem by Hafez which goes, "Even after all this time, the sun never says to the Earth , 'You owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that... It lights the whole sky."

But Dickinson's flower poems always have another layer to them.

Here are the clues. The first one is “Darlings of the soil.” The word "darling" comes from the Old English word deorling, which literally translates to "little dear one." "Darling of the soil" then can also be read as a young child that has died and been buried. To equate this child with a flower is already meaningful, but there's more going on here. The poem unfurls in a profound way when you replace flower with child.

Just as the flowers grant us all of their "countenance," a child granted us all of theirs. The old sense of the word “countenance” is face. We got to know this darling face, and now that there is nothing further to do, we are asked only to delight in having gotten to know it. Yet all we can seem to muster is a penurious smile. The penurious smile here takes on a different meaning when you replace flower with child.  Penurious is a word with a double meaning. It can mean "stingy," which is the way we read it in the primary "flower" reading of this poem, but it can also mean "destitute" which is how we read it in relation to "child." In the first case, the smile is poor because it is in comparison to the flower's, but in the latter case, the smile is poor because we are grieving.

Once you work out the two simultaneous meanings of the poem a kind of alchemy takes place wherein the dead child becomes the flower. We are reminded that all of nature, including the child, is there to delight us, and that we may find comfort in its countenance. 

Like the double meaning of the word "penurious," both meanings of "countenance" come into play in this poem. The way this poem is semantically arranged, "countenance" may be both a noun or a verb. The verb "to countenance" means to give one mental composure and moral support.  The flowers countenance us from the very place in the earth where the countenance of the darling has been laid to rest.

The death of children was extremely common in Dickinson’s time. The survival rate for children was around 50%. I wonder if this poem might have been sent as a note of condolence to a grieving family, along with a bouquet of flowers. This context would’ve made the double nature of this poem very poignant.


        -/)dam Wade l)eGraff