The parting with the rest
Feels easy, as when Day lets go
Entirely the West
The Peaks, that lingered last
Remain in Her regret
As scarcely as the Iodine
Upon the Cataract.
-Fr961, J853, sheet 21, 1865
What does it mean to give up One’s life? It doesn’t mean to die, because there is still the “parting with the rest” to do. We can only speculate what it meant for Emily, but I read it as something like acceptance of death.
The first line has a hint of the tragic in it, of giving up, but the rest of the poem has a sense of “easy” and of freedom from “regret.”
This poem reads like a meditation on aging. Cataracts, after all, tend to form on the eyes of the elderly, and life has already had its “Peaks.” In this sense, the poem is the flip side of Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Thomas wrote this famous villanelle to his ailing father, urging him to "Rage, Rage against the dying of the light," but I wonder how his father might have felt about this. “Let me go in peace, son! Bring me that poem by Emily Dickinson.”
The really interesting thing about this poem for me is the way “Cataract” appears to have a double meaning. Iodine was a popular cure for cataracts in the 1800s. The metaphor fits the poem beautifully because a cataract slowly clouds over the eyes.
It is a slow “parting with the rest,” with sight itself. Once you accept death, then you accept all that comes with it, the loss of sight, loss of hearing, hair, friends, etc. This is easier said than done, but once done things get easier.
But a "Cataract" is also a waterfall, and this reading makes a lot of sense too, especially as it follows the metaphor of the mountain peaks in the West. The “iodine” then would be the color of the last bit of light on the waterfall coming down from the peaks. It’s the final color of light showing on the rush of the great roaring waterfall. Dickinson has used Iodine to describe the end of a sunset before, see Fr875.
But a "Cataract" is also a waterfall, and this reading makes a lot of sense too, especially as it follows the metaphor of the mountain peaks in the West. The “iodine” then would be the color of the last bit of light on the waterfall coming down from the peaks. It’s the final color of light showing on the rush of the great roaring waterfall. Dickinson has used Iodine to describe the end of a sunset before, see Fr875.
Iodine
At first I was trying to decide which of these two possible meanings of "Cataract" Dickinson meant, but since they are both so apt I've come to suspect that she may well have had both ideas in mind.
Life is a series of awesome, but difficult peaks, as violent and tremendous as a waterfall. There is peace in letting go of all of that, and in letting go of regrets too.
-/)dam Wade l)eGraff
“Let me go in peace, son! Bring me that poem by Emily Dickinson.”
ReplyDeleteConsidering how my volume of “The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin” — dog-earred, loose-leafed, pencil-marked, highlighted different colors to note the appearance of bees (yellow), butterflies (blue), birds (orange), flowers (pink), plant-life (green) — has become a kind of secular Bible for me over these last two years of my life, in no small part due to the Prowling Bee; given that it has become for me a repository of mediations love and desire and pain and mortality and everything in between, a source of wonder and exasperation alike, a melody, a Silver Chronicle, a deep dive into the fundament of beauty and art, a gathering place in time and out of time for a community of fellow-spirits; and, perhaps most mysterious and moving of all, given that it reads like an extended letter from a single woman living in Amherst 161 years ago, long dead, who speaks still; given all that, it occurred to me as I read this line that I may very well speak these words to one of my children when someday I face the dimming of the light.
Hear hear, Tom. So much depends upon that last glimmer of iodine on the Cataract.
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