Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality,
Nay, it is Deity—
Unable they that love—to die
For Love reforms Vitality
Into Divinity.
-F951, J809, sheet 20, 1865
This poem doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Upon a cursory reading it seemed to have the sweet faith-based belief in the eternal quality of Love. But then I got tripped up on the dash in the second stanza. Let's start with the first stanza though:
Unable are the Loved to die
For Love is Immortality,
Nay, it is Deity—
For Love is Immortality,
Nay, it is Deity—
This is comforting. You can't die if you are loved, for that love is immortal, "Nay, it is Deity." If you are loved, it eases the dying.
But that's only half the equation. How about the dying part? How about the loving part?
But that's only half the equation. How about the dying part? How about the loving part?
This brings us to the second stanza. Look at the subtle move Dickinson makes.
Unable they that love—to die
For Love reforms Vitality
Into Divinity.
Has a dash in Dickinson a poem ever done so much?
If you read the poem quickly, you miss the dash. The poem is merely sweet: to be loved is to transcend death and to love is to transcend death.
But the dash in that line that trips us up. It cheekily interrupts the sentence structure that the first stanza set up. "Unable are the loved to die" becomes "Unable they that love—to die." Why did that dash show up to interrupt that sentence? And then you realize it is because that dash is meant to interrupt that sentence for good. That dash is a period. If you stop at the dash, the poem takes on a whole new gravity. Death itself sneaks in the poem at that dash. Dash—Death.
Read the stanza again with a period (or at the very least a comma) where the dash is.
Unable they that love. To die
For Love reforms Vitality
Into Divinity.
Now the lover is unable not to die. “Unable they that love.” The lover is unable to go on forever, because the one being loved eventually must go. Heartbreak/death is built into the deal. The next sentence then takes on a gigantic weight. “To die for Love reforms Vitality into Divinity.”
To love means a willingness to take on the heartbreak of death, to take on mortality. It is the bravest thing one can do, die for love. This is Divinity a la Christ And it is this kind of willingness to die for love that "reforms" vitality into divinity. "Reform" is such a perfect word here. It is the ease-of-being-the-loved-one "reforming" into the difficulty-of-being-the-lover.
When you reform and the vitality of your life is given over to love, then you have the power to make the loved one Immortal. Opening yourself to heartbreak frees love.
-/)dam Wade l)eGraff
Thank you for the beautiful explanation and for drawing our attention to the dash, which I would have certainly missed!!
ReplyDeleteIt's a pity that the lover must die... I would have liked it better that love, real love takes two simple people and transforms them to immortal deities/divinities (in different ways for the lover and the loved).
Maybe the lover is unable to die also, something like that:
Unable they that love to die— [because even] to die
For Love reforms Vitality
Into Divinity.
In fact, I think that the one that loves purely and intensely is closer to divinity, to not dying, to immortality (in the sense that time has lost its meaning and feels like eternity etc).
Maybe I just want to be optimistic for both, I like happy endings!!!
Me too, Harry. I actually had to rewrite this one because my first version didn't really account for the dash. But I suppose a happy ending is relative. Dying for love, especially if that love frees the beloved, could be seen as the happiest ending possible. It's just that loving is a harder path than being loved. It's romantic in a deeper way. It's brave to give of one's self so fully, and it's ultimately selfless (as death is!), asking nothing in return.
ReplyDeleteAll that said, I'm still not certain that dash was meant as a period the way I'm reading it. Perhaps the dash is merely as brief pause in the sentence, and the lover is immortalized too through reforming vitality into Divinity.
That's a beautiful thought. But the poem takes on more weight for me if the dash is read as a period. The lover dies into the Immortal Beloved.