Each Scar I'll keep for Him

Each Scar I'll keep for Him
Instead I'll say of Gem
In His long Absence worn
A Costlier one

But every Tear I bore
Were He to count them o'er
His own would fall so more
I'll missum them —


-F920, J877, sheet 12, 1865


This poem has an involved complexity that takes a while to unravel, but it's worth it as it has something beautiful to say about love. Let's start at the beginning:

Each Scar I'll keep for Him
Instead I'll say of Gem

I will treasure and preserve every emotional wound. But instead of calling these injuries, I'll think of them as valuable gems. Instead I'll say (they are) of Gem.

In His long Absence worn

These wounds/gems were acquired from absence from the loved one.

A Costlier one

These "gems" are precious because they were earned through suffering. The pain of missing is proof of love, and therefore something precious. "Costlier" is a pointed word here. There was a dear cost (pain), therefore the scars/gems cost more (gain).

In the first stanza the poem establishes a theme of economy. The scars have a "cost." Then the poem shifts into accounting:

But every Tear I bore
Were He to count them o'er

Now we're literally in the language of reckoning. It's an audit of tears!

Then comes:

His own would fall so more
I'll missum them —

Were he to count my tears, and see how many there really are, then, because of His love, he would cry even more tears than I am, so therefore I'll misrepresent the amount.

As she often does, Dickinson takes the language of commerce and turns it inside out. Love doesn't follow the ordinary rules of accounting. Loss is entered as profit.

Missum is a cool word. I’ve read analyses of this poem that read this as “miss some,” but I don’t think so. It's awkward. "I'll miss some them"? I also don't see Dickinson misspelling "some" to be cute. I believe it must mean mis-sum.

She is saying, "I'll make the reckoning come out wrong." She won't let him see the total of her suffering. The emotional cost is falsified out of love. It's an act of loving deception.

There's an interesting twist if "Him" is Christ. If Christ were to count her tears, he would weep more than she did. So she says she'll missum them, she'll under-report to spare even Him grief. If so, it's a pretty surprising reversal, the believer protecting the Savior. She's pulling a Christ on Christ by refusing justice in favor of mercy.

There’s an elegant symmetry in this poem. In the first stanza you are seeing the scars as gems, and in the second you are missumming tears. The poem begins by revaluing suffering. Missumming the tears is doing something similar. In both cases, reality is reframed; one act changes how she sees her own suffering, and the other changes how he will see it.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Notes: 

1. Poetry itself may be seen as a kind of "mis-summing." Calling scars "gems" and "mis-summing" tears are poetic moves.

2. M is a sacred sound, the sound of Mother, of home. It's the sound a baby makes when it is hungry for mom's milk. MMMM. So perhaps it is significant that the M begins and ends this poem. To drive the sound home, there is a tripling up of the M in that last line, "I'll missum them."