Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord,

Tie the Strings to my Life, My Lord,

Then, I am ready to go!

Just a look at the Horses --

Rapid! That will do!

Put me in on the firmest side --

So I shall never fall --

For we must ride to the Judgment --

And it's partly, down Hill --

But never I mind the steepest --

And never I mind the Sea --

Held fast in Everlasting Race --

By my own Choice, and Thee --

Goodbye to the Life I used to live --

And the World I used to know --

And kiss the Hills, for me, just once --

Then -- I am ready to go!

                                                                                          F338 (1862)  279

Dickinson paints a picture for us here of a person at the end of her life as if she were about to embark on a hair-raising carriage ride. This journey is quite different from the one she will describe in “Because I could not stop for Death” where she and the coachman (Death) take a leisurely trip past the mileposts of her life, gradually arriving at eternity. Instead, she asks the lord to tie up the loose ends of her life (or perhaps to untie her from life and tie her to the eternal other side), give her at least a glance at the horses that will convey her from one side of that great divide to the other, and then take off.

                  She is excited about the trip: “Rapid! That will do!” Let’s go, in other words. She only asks to be put on the most secure side of the carriage—she anticipates it might be an up-and-down route for at least part of it is “down Hill.” While it might be common to think of “down” as the Hell side of eternity, I don’t get the sense that Dickinson means that her post mortem trip will be skirting the region of the damned. Instead, she is looking at the transition between this world and the next as an exciting adventure.

                  We saw something of this in “Dropped into the Ether Acre” where the newly dead soul is being carried by “Horses of Blonde—and Coach of Silver” on a “Journey of Down—and Whip of Diamond— / Riding to meet the Earl.” In an 1860 poem, “Exultation is the going,”  Dickinson likened the venturing forth after death to the “going / Of an inland soul to sea,” calling the adventure a “divine intoxication.” In this she shares Shakespeare’s idea of death, at least the idea voiced by Hamlet, as an “undiscovered country.”

                  The poet doesn’t mind the steep road that leads to “Judgment” for she is “Held fast” in the race of life and death by her own choice and by God. No one forced her into this situation. She has been in control and is completely confident.

                  But perhaps her “lord” isn’t God, but her Master lover. Reading the poem this way—and I think one can—we see the poet hell bent on seizing the moment. She doesn’t mind the crazy ride for she has made her choice and she is held secure by her lover. She will let their love take them where it will, abandoning herself to it.

                  But whether one reads the poem as an adventure to the undiscovered country of death or the unpredictable turns of fate in passion, it is clear that the poet is willing to say “Goodbye to the Life” she used to live and is “ready to go!”

                  Dickinson may have penned this poem after one of those long days when her mother was being needy and helpless and her father abrupt and dictatorial. Who wouldn’t be ready to hare off in some totally new direction?

Of nearness to her sundered Things

Of nearness to her sundered Things

The Soul has special times—

When Dimness—looks the Oddity—

Distinctness—easy—seems—

The Shapes we buried, dwell about,

Familiar, in the Rooms—

Untarnished by the Sepulchre,

The Mouldering Playmate comes—

In just the Jacket that he wore—

Long buttoned in the Mold

Since we—old mornings, Children—played—

Divided—by a world—

The Grave yields back her Robberies—

The Years, our pilfered Things—

Bright Knots of Apparitions

Salute us, with their wings—

As we—it were—that perished—

Themself—had just remained till we rejoin them—

And 'twas they, and not ourself

That mourned—

                                                            F337 (1862) 607

This poem has a dreamy quality appropriate to its topic. There are misty moments when the dead seem very close: rather than the dimness with which we usually recall them, we see them distinct. There is the childhood playmate in the same little jacket we remember, and all the dear departed come like apparitions and “Salute us, with their wings.”

            The last stanza suggests that it is the dead who have a sort of eternal life—it is we who are aging and dying; consequently it is the dead who mourn the living. It’s a nostalgic poem rather than one of horror. I’m a bit surprised at its contrast to “The only Ghost I ever saw,” a poem written within the same year, where Dickinson finds her encounter with a shy and harmless ghost to be “appalling.” But I think she wasn’t serious in that poem. The current one seems much closer to her true feelings.

            The poem is written in hymn form—you could sing it to “Amazing Grace.” 

Before I got my eye put out—

Before I got my eye put out—

I liked as well to see

As other creatures, that have eyes—

And know no other way—

But were it told to me, Today,

That I might have the Sky

For mine, I tell you that my Heart

Would split, for size of me—

The Meadows—mine—

The Mountains—mine—

All Forests—Stintless stars—

As much of noon, as I could take—

Between my finite eyes—

The Motions of the Dipping Birds—

The Morning’s Amber Road—

For mine—to look at when I liked,

The news would strike me dead—

So safer—guess—with just my soul

Upon the window pane

Where other creatures put their eyes—

Incautious—of the Sun—

                                                            F336 (1862)  327 

Much has been made in critical writing of Dickinson’s poor eyesight. In 1862, the year this poem was written, she wrote about a “terror” in a letter to her poetic mentor Thomas Higginson. Other clues about this time suggest this terror involved a loss of sight. To a poet who loved to read, to garden, and to cook—to say nothing of writing in her room by candlelight or oil lamp—deteriorating vision would be terrible indeed.

A few years later Dickinson would travel to Boston to have ophthalmic treatments. Respected Dickinson biographer, Richard Sewall, believed the poet suffered from exotropia—a hereditary disease that causes “eye strain, blurring of vision, difficulties with prolonged periods of reading, headaches, and diplopia [double vision]. … They also might have acute sensitivity to “bright light in general and sunlight in particular.” If Dickinson was suffering from these symptoms intermittently at first, it might account for her occasional sense of being staggered or overwhelmed by the sun or by light.

            While the sun in Dickinson’s poetry often represents spiritual or intellectual illumination, or divinity, she has also used the sun metaphorically as a mighty and inherently dangerous, even downright cruel, godlike figure. Sometimes this figure stands in for an uncaring lover as in “The Daisy follows soft the Sun,” or “The Sun—just touched the Morning.” In “The Love a Life can show Below” she writes of a “diviner thing” that “far abroad on Summer days— / Distils uncertain pain.” This reminds us of that “certain Slant of light” that delivers “Heavenly Hurt.”

            But sometimes the sun brings Dickinson an almost unearthly delight. In her famous poem “I taste a liquor never brewed” she is drunken with sunlight, a “little Tippler / Leaning against the—Sun!”

            In the current poem, Dickinson takes the remarkable position that having only one eye—having the other one “put out” is the melodramatic phrase she uses—is “safer” than having full vision restored. That dramatic opening line, “Before I got my eye put out,” certainly gets the reader’s interest! Yes, she continues, I enjoyed seeing as much as any other creature with eyes. Eyes are how we see the world and understand our place in it.

            In the following three stanzas, however, she contends that being able to once more actually see the world and all its wonders in their full splendor would kill her. In fact, just the information that she would get her vision back would “strike [her] dead.” The problem is that to see is to have. She “might have the Sky.” Meadows and mountains, forests, “Stintless stars,” and noon would all be hers. “The Meadows—mine— / The mountains—mine,” she writes. All of that limitless wonder, “As much of noon, as I could take,” all between her “finite eyes.” If the eyes can truly be considered the windows to the soul, than her soul would be in for a massive delivery of world and cosmos.

            She goes on to say that even the sight of bird flight or the bright amber light of morning on the dirt road would be lethal. She concludes that she would be safer with “just” her soul experiencing the world. The image is that of a soul pressed against a window—and it is an image suitable for a poet. Her soul is open to life and currents of existence around her that those with mere eyes for vision might never see.

            But as so often is the case with Dickinson, the last line delivers a twist: “other creatures put their eyes” against the window, “Incautious—of the Sun.” They don’t realize that the bringer of warmth and summer and light is deadly. And with this image Dickinson is also suggesting, I believe, that the poet’s soul, like a creature’s eye, is vulnerable to too much light. We cannot bear too much truth or enlightenment. It’s much safer to see things and to take life in a commonplace way or else, like Icarus whose image I see behind these lines, we too will melt in the sun’s intense heat and fall headlong into the sea.