As imperceptibly as Grief

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like Perfidy —
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon —
The dusk drew earlier in —
The morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest that would be gone —
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

        
        -F935, J1540, sheet 16, 1865

While researching this poem I came across a fantastic exploration of it by Huck Gutman. I reached out to Mr. Gutman to see if he would be amenable to being the guest commenter on the poem for Prowling Bee and he graciously agreed. 

(Note that there is another version of this poem, a longer "rough draft." I will include it in the post-script.)

Take it away, Huck...

'“As imperceptibly as Grief” is a poem of the seasons. It is a poem of close observation. The particular seasonal moment Dickinson describes is one that we in Washington have just seen pass, the imperceptible juncture when summer ends and fall begins.

There is an artfulness to the poem we may not notice as we read these sixteen lines for the first time. Rereading carefully can bring the verse form to light: if we reread and pay attention, we see the poem is far more tightly structured than we might have imagined on first acquaintance with it.

Though there are no stanza breaks in this poem, it follows Dickinson’s usual pattern of common meter. It is helpful to think of it as being comprised of four stanzas. Why? First, because each stanza is a sentence; second, because in each stanza the second and fourth line rhyme. A master of slant rhyme – words which tend toward rhyme but don’t have the often deadening conclusiveness of full rhymes, words whose sounds echo other words but do not match those sounds precisely – Dickinson rhymes ‘away’ with ‘Perfidy,’ ‘begun’ with ‘Afternoon,’ ‘shone’ with ‘gone’ (with ‘in’ placed in the stanza for good measure as an additional slant rhyme – and with all three echoing the earlier ‘’n’ rhymes of the second stanza) and ‘Keel’ with ‘Beautiful.’

These slant rhymes, you might ask, why are they important if we tend not to notice fully that they are there? Well, first, they tighten the poem: they pull it together more than we ‘know.’ And second, we do know: rhymes are not merely technical things that poets insert to meet some abstract poetic standard, but audible repetitions and variations that make us think that more has gone into the poem than goes into the vagaries of everyday speech. Just as with music, which so often most of us cannot explain, we can hear the rhythms and repetitions and riffs. When we hear these patterns we intuit that a mind is at work making some sense – sometimes only auditory sense – of the “dull miscellany and lumber room” that is our jumbled experience of the everyday. [As long as we are paying attention to sounds and how they tighten our auditory experience, note that in each of these first four lines there is at least one ‘s’ sound and an ‘l’ sound. These sounds recur throughout the poem, creating another series of repetitions that tie the lines together into one whole.]

Extraordinary, those first two lines. I once had a teacher, Ennis Rees, a modest poet and a highly regarded translator of Homer, who said that every poem by Dickinson had a line or two that any poet would give his right arm to have written. In this poem, I dare say, most poets would give their right arm to have written any of the two line phrases. Here is how the poem begins, marvelously:

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away –

One of the most stunning things in Dickinson (and the aforementioned Wallace Stevens) is how often the outer climate in her poems is connected to inner climate. We could tease out a question raised in these first two lines: is the poem about summer, or is it about grief? There is, of course, no answer: the poem is about both.

Thus, the poem begins with a comparison (summer/grief). Both summer and grief lapse so gradually that we do not notice their going. Even “imperceptibly” lapses slowly in line three to “imperceptible,” a movement I have never noticed until now, though I have read the poem for many years[3]. The repetition of imperceptible does not call attention to itself: what happens is that the word itself silently slides into a shorter form and at the same time becomes a more substantial phenomenon, moving from adverb to adjective, from process to thing. The lapsing of summer is barely noticeable, if noticeable at all.

So too with grief, because the metaphor (the ending of summer compared to grief) works both ways. Summer lapses away like grief lapses away. And grief lapses away just as summer does. Summer is linked to grief because the end of summer betokens the slow onset of winter, the displacement of sunlight by darkness. The seasonal shift Dickinson is describing is one of transition, and more specifically, loss.

We easily understand the simile that the leisurely lapsing away of summer is like perfidy – treachery, betrayal – as we likewise understand that the gradual ebb is so unhurried that it doesn’t really seem like betrayal. Put metaphysically, we are betrayed by time, time in which fullness declines; in more concrete terms, time is represented by the glorious days of summer which slip into declining light, declining warmth and declining fruitfulness.

The first stanza is further enriched when we think of grief: it too ebbs away. This lapse is a more perfidious, a greater betrayal. We betray the lives of those for whom we grieve when the slowly slide from our memory. Our loss, their meaning to us, slips away from consciousness.

A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon—

At the turning point, as summer drifts away, all is quiet – how wonderfully Dickinson puts it, the essence of quiet, “quietness distilled” – into long evenings, which come earlier than they did before. (“A Dusk drew earlier in,” the poet tells us several lines later.) Nature seems to pull into herself, “sequestered” in that quiet turning point.

Loneliness and a distance adhere to time as the afternoon is “sequestered,” cut off. No one, no one, can use a word as precisely and yet as surprisingly as Dickinson. It is one of the characteristics of her greatness, one of the marks of her acute consciousness of the world in which she lives. In poem after poem, language shocks us as she uses terms are reasonably familiar in ways that no human being has ever used them before. Often, as in this poem, such words appear in line after line, as with “perfidy,” “distilled,” “foreign,” “harrowing,” “light escape” and here, “sequestered.”

Sequester: – verb (used with object)

1. to remove or withdraw into solitude or retirement; seclude.

2. Law: to remove (property) temporarily from the possession of the owner; seize and hold, as the property and income of a debtor, until legal claims are satisfied.

Origin: 1350–1400; Middle English sequestren (Latin sequestrare to put in hands of a trustee, derivative of sequester trustee, depositary)

The afternoon is removed from the day, its solitude presaged by the use of “quietness distilled.” The afternoon that is taken from both summer’s brightness and from our human sphere is presaged by the “Perfidy” of the fourth line.

The Dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone—

Dickinson is the least sentimental of all the great American writers. This is no paean to the calm of late summer. This is no hymn to a “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,/ Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,” though it is autumn and not the slow decline of summer that Keats describes in these lines from his great ode, “To Autumn.”

Nor is night a friend, here, as it is for Yeats in his early poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” when twilight falls and “peace comes dropping slow.” Here, as the days shorten, the dusk comes earlier: “drew earlier in” echoes the sequestering of the previous line.

The following day’s later dawn is “foreign.” It comes later than it did in summer: we are not accustomed to the changing of the season which has crept up on us. That dawn is – a surprise, more: a shock – a grace which harrows. The phrase is an oxymoron; that is, grace is conventionally the opposite of harrowing, yet here it is conjoined with it.

But let’s look at the phrase even more closely and consider its concrete elements. Dickinson lived in rural New England: “harrowing” to her would not be, as it is to us, merely a very tough time. Unlike we in the 21st century who are so accustomed to the term that we don’t call to mind the metaphor on which it is based, the Amherst poet would be very familiar with a harrow. To Dickinson and to her nineteenth century rural contemporaries, the term “harrowing” would refer directly, visually, to a field that is being been harrowed, carved up by sharp disks or harsh iron pegs that scour acreage like savage mechanical teeth. Here, it is Grace which harrows – not, as we might expect from what we know of loss, grace which is being harrowed. Grace is what rips into us, the grace (of our loss fading from memory) serving as the instrument of “Perfidy.”

The morning is “courteous” despite the fact that its grace harrows. The grace (think of summer, which disappears with later dawns) like a guest takes its leave of us. Here, we return to the “Grief” of the first line, which slides away, the sliding a “grace” because it allows us to live but a “harrowing grace” because forgetfulness is the most terrifying of things.

And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.

In the final lines the summer slips away. Its passing is not like the things we know in this world: its transit out of our existence is “without a Wing/Or service of a Keel,” neither bird nor sailing boat.

And the summer leaves us behind. We, it turns out, are sequestered in the world, while summer, well, “summer made her light escape/ Into the Beautiful.” Make no mistake, the escape is not light, although it occurs so “imperceptibly” (to return to the first line) that it seems light. The summer escapes into a realm that is not ours: the Beautiful, which we encounter only briefly (if at all) before it escapes from us. It leaves us behind, harrowed, with darkness settling earlier and more thoroughly upon us. That “light escape” refers to the light of summer, which passes easily; meanwhile, possessing consciousness, aware of the passing even if only imperceptibly, that escape of summer is not ‘light’ for us.

The passage of time marks his poem. The season is changing. The “light escape” alludes to not just the imperceptible change from summer to after-summer, but also to that lessening of the light the central lines of the poem refer to. Light has begun the process of leaving. The poem, as beautiful as it is, as finely and delicately observed, is at once a poem of celebration – oh! that we were graced with that light – but even more, it is a poem of tragedy in which we are betrayed, left as foreigners in a land that should be ours, harrowed, adrift in a world which is separate from the beautiful and the natural and the eternal.

We grieve over that loss of summer, even before we know it, as the first line of the poem tells us. Ours is a lapsed world – what is beautiful is no longer ours, time has intruded, and our response to that is grief, which slowly steals over us.

Were I to write a poem about the passing of summer, even if I recognized the slow silent change coming on, I would not be able to achieve either the lightness and courtesy, nor the ‘perfidious…foreign…harrowing… gone’-ness that Dickinson evinces. Extraordinarily often I marvel at Dickinson’s ability to see, in the things of daily life, what I could see if only I were more perceptive.

Dickinson sees what we cannot because she brings to her existence such an intense concentrated focus that we marvel that a human consciousness is capable of this degree of concentration. Were we more courageous and strong-willed, less sentimental, more open to the actuality of our experience, more attentive to each moment, we would see what she does. But it is, at least for me, only by and through reading her poems that I can reach this intense awareness of the world.

In “As imperceptibly as Grief” Dickinson has taken that moment when summer turns a silent and unseen – but not unfelt – corner toward something else, darker, colder, less conducive to life. Call it winter, though winter is far, far off. But she feels it coming, and knows that the bounty of the world has made its “light escape/ Into the Beautiful.”'

        -Huck Gutman

Thank you, Huck. This was a very in-depth and helpful discussion of a difficult poem and it really enriched my understanding of it. I look forward to reading more of your work. 

        -/)dam Wade l)eGraff 

P.S. Thomas Johnson's Note on "As imperceptibly as Grief":

MANUSCRIPT: There are four copies of this poem. They are somewhat variant in text and they span many years. The copy reproduced above is the latest and is in the handwriting of late 1882; it is in the Department of History and Archives, Des Moines, Iowa. The earliest copy is that in packet 92 (Bingham 78a), written in late 1865. It is a semifinal draft in eight stanzas. All three later fair copies omit stanzas 3-6; one may therefore assume that ED permanently discarded them. 

Here is the first "rough draft" of the poem:

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away -
Too imperceptible at last
To feel like Perfidy -

A Quietness distilled -
As Twilight long begun -
Or Nature - spending with Herself
Sequestered Afternoon -

Sobriety inhered
Though gaudy influence
The Maple lent unto the Road
And graphic Consequence

Invested sombre place -
As suddenly be worn
By sober Individual
A Homogeneous Gown.

Departed was the Bird -
And scarcely had the Hill -
A flower to help His straightened face
In stress of Burial -

The Winds came closer up -
The Cricket spoke so clear
Presumption was - His Ancestors
Inherited the Floor -

The Dusk drew earlier in -
The Morning foreign shone -
The courteous, but harrowing Grace
Of Guest who would be gone -

And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel -
Our Summer made Her light Escape
Unto the Beautiful -