Deprived of other Banquet,

Deprived of other Banquet,
I entertained Myself—
At first—a scant nutrition—
An insufficient Loaf—

But grown by slender addings
To so esteemed a size
'Tis sumptuous enough for me—
And almost to suffice

A Robin's famine able—
Red Pilgrim, He and I—
A Berry from our table
Reserve—for charity—


    -Fr872, J773, 1864


Deprived of other Banquet
I entertained Myself—

Left bare, bereft, and yet the poet is still able to entertain herself nonetheless, and sumptuously so.

What does it mean to entertain yourself? I have one friend who will make himself gourmet dinners. Most people, including myself, are only spending the time to make a great meal if it is for someone else, but I have a lot of respect for the friend who does so for himself. 

 

I asked my HS students recently to write about what they would do if they knew they were only going to have an hour to live. Most of them said they would like to be surrounded by friends and family. But one student wrote that if she only had an hour left she would watch the sunset. And she wouldn’t take any pictures, she said, because she wanted it “to be only mine.” I thought of this poem... I entertained Myself—

Poetry is a kind of entertainment for Emily. Perhaps it wasn’t the feast of great love she once had, but through the poem, in our hands, Emily has made the best use of her great reserves of love. This poem, this entertainment, is a love letter.

At first—a scant nutrition—
An insufficient Loaf—

This self-entertaining, in lieu of a great feast, would be difficult at first.  When you no longer have enough food, the hunger, in the beginning, seems overwhelming, but eventually you get accustomed to making more of less.

But grown by slender addings
To so esteemed a size

If there was a banquet before, now you picture a few slender slices of bread. That’s all there is left. But these slender slices eventually add up, with careful cultivation, to plenty. “Slender” is doing extra work here because the word reminds us that the poet herself has grown slender for lack of sustenance. 

There is another way to take "slender addings" though. If poetry was the way Dickinson entertained herself, the soul-food that sustained her, then each slender adding is a page. Poem by poem, page by page Dickinson made a feast out of loss.

To so esteemed a size

Each slender poem that was added did amount, in the end, "to so esteemed a size," nearly 2000 astonishing poems.

'Tis sumptuous enough for me—

"Sumptuous" is a sumptuous word and it therefore helps make the poem more sumptuous.  

A great poet’s capacity for beauty is vast. Even scarcity can be made lush.

And almost to suffice

That “almost” is understated. There is no making up, perhaps, for lost love, no matter how exquisitely sumptuous the entertainment. Art does not fully replace what was lost. 

A Robin's famine able—
Red Pilgrim, He and I—
A Berry from our table
Reserve—for charity—

This stanza reminds me of all those other Dickinson poems about robins and crumbs. It’s a favorite subject of hers. If anyone with time on their hands wants a good project, please publish all of these robin poems together as a chapbook. Or better yet, make it a book that includes all of her bird poems, with a chapter on Robins. This would be a worthwhile labor of love. Thank you in advance.

By aligning herself with the "red pilgrim" robin, Dickinson frames deprivation as a spiritual journey rather than a failure. 

And what is shared? A berry, the sweetest portion of the fare.

This poem shows us why it is beautiful to be bare to the bone. It imagines life not as a banquet regained, but as a shared economy of care. This poem itself is like the berry. It's a berry good poem. It is small, concentrated and sweet. It sustains.

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S.


That word "deprived" troubles me. It is deliberately vague, and therefore haunting. Was Dickinson deprived of Susan Gilbert? Of Charles Wadsworth, whom some, including her niece Mattie, believed she loved? Or was the deprivation something broader, a life constrained by gender, by family, by circumstance?

Some readers have speculated about darker possibilities within the Dickinson household, but these remain conjecture. What matters, finally, is not the precise cause of deprivation, but what Dickinson does with it. She transforms her loss into a poem with which to feed others.

Dickinson does not tell us what the banquet was. Love, vocation, marriage, health, God, recognition, bodily safety, simple happiness. That vagueness is not a deficiency, but rather the mechanism by which the poem works.

“Deprived of other Banquet” has a conspicuous absence at its center. The readers must fill it for themselves.

You could say that the poem’s generosity, then, comes from what it withholds. The less a poem insists, the more it gives. The more it names, the less room there is for anyone else to stand inside it.

Dickinson withholds the cause, but it's not because she's being coy. Rather, this is the discipline of care. A good poem wants to be used.

The hallowing of Pain

The hallowing of Pain
Like hallowing of Heaven,
Obtains at a corporeal cost—
The Summit is not given

To Him who strives severe
At middle of the Hill—
But He who has achieved the Top—
All—is the price of All—

    -Fr871, J772, 1864



This poem seems pretty straight forward for Dickinson. “The summit is not given to him who strives severe at middle of the hill.” In other words, the price of getting to the top is giving it your all.

The hallowing of Pain
Like hallowing of Heaven,

The hallowing (the making sacred) of Pain is likened to the hallowing of Heaven. They are thus aligned. We are hallowed through pain, just as Heaven is. Both are obtained at corporeal cost.

This poem reads like a marathon runner's mantra. No pain, no gain.

If so, Dickinson is like a coach, and she’s cheering us up that hill. You got this. All it’s going to take is everything you’ve got! Let’s go!

But wait. Really? The severe striving in the middle of the hill isn’t severe enough? 

The Summit is not given
To Him who strives severe
At middle of the Hill—

He who strives severe at the middle of hill will not attain the top, so you must be severer still. Yeesh.

Calvinism, which was central to the belief system of most of New England in the 19th century, took great stock in the idea of suffering. Read this way the poem seems austerely Calvinistic, almost masochistic.

But was Emily really so severe?

The pleasure sneaks in though this poem. For instance, listen to what Dickinson does with the “ALL” sound in this poem. It starts with “The hALLowing of Pain, Like the hALLowing of Heaven." Then the "ALL" sound bends slightly into corporEAL and hILL, and middLE . Finally it ends emphatically with that double ALL. “ALL is the price of ALL.”

With that pleasure in mind I would propose a possible alternative reading to this poem.

In the opening lines, 

The hallowing of Pain
Like hallowing of Heaven,
Obtains at a corporeal cost—

we note it's not pain one is obtaining at a cost, but the hallowing of pain. In other words, you can read this line as saying that it is the act of making pain hallowed (holy, sacred) that comes at a cost.

What would that cost be? Pleasure right?

But isn't poetry a pleasure?

In this light, the last line, "All—is the price of All—," might have a different meaning. Severity is not all there is. It doesn't include virtues like mercy, tenderness and grace. The price of those things is an acceptance of all things. So all things must be (h)allowed, not just pain. That would be "Like hallowing of Heaven," which could be seen as the neglecting of those in hell.

Did Emily intend this second reading? Maybe, but maybe not. I think Emily did sometimes suffer from an austere Calvinistic streak (see Fr865, where she says pleasure should come with an austere trait), and I believe she had a competitive drive toward greatness too, to "achieve the top."

But on second thought, maybe this alternative reading is what Emily meant here? I've almost convinced myself of it. Or rather, it is the sound of the poem that convinces me. The lulling sound of all that allness. hALLowing hALLowing corporEAL, middLE, hILL, ALL, ALL. It sounds too lovely to be too severe don't you think?

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

None can experience sting

None can experience sting
Who Bounty—have not known—
The fact of Famine—could not be
Except for Fact of Corn—

Want—is a meagre Art
Acquired by Reverse—
The Poverty that was not Wealth—
Cannot be Indigence.

     -Fr 870, J771, 1864

The first stanza is a classic bit of wisdom. We’ve seen Dickinson hammer this point home in poem after poem. (So does Buddha, by the way, and many other helpful guides besides.) Lack and fulfillment are two sides of a coin. You can’t have one without the other. But it's the untenable tension between the two that drives one, eventually, to a realization of equanimity, toward a position of balance and poise.

In the next stanza the thought continues,

Want—is a meagre Art
Acquired by Reverse—

To exist in a state of want, or, unfulfilled desire, is an art. But how do we pull off this paradox? How do you remain perpetually in a state of desire without actually having that desire filled. It's a conundrum. It's not an easy art!

Dickinson calls this a meagre Art and at first this seems to mean the "art of want" is meagre in comparison to the art of having. But knowing Dickinson, she’s being wry. She’s turning it around to instead say something like “less is more.” It’s not so much that the art itself is meagre, or is lesser, but that mastering meagreness, having less, is the art.

Meagre is an interesting word. It can mean both lacking in quantity, as in, you have less, but also lacking in quality, as in, you are less. The poet here is feeling meagre, or lesser, precisely because she once had something so great. Having once had so much more makes no longer having it that much more difficult. This is a theme we often see running through Dickinson’s poems. She seems to have experienced a love so great that everything else pales in comparison. She is therefore left contending with overwhelming want. But the intensity of this contention also drove her art. Her want drove her art. 

It leaves me as a reader in an odd dilemma. This suffering, this meagre want, is what drove Dickinson to her art. And yet, would I have wished it on her? No, I wouldn’t. But would I deprive myself, and the world, of these poems? No, I wouldn't.

The Poverty that was not Wealth—
Cannot be Indigence.

These last two lines read as an imperative: you have to make art, however meagre, because “The Poverty that was not Wealth/ Cannot be (must not become) Indigence.”

Indigence is a state of destitution. To avoid this, we make art, however meagre it might be in comparison to having our desire.

There is a funny little twist in the line “The Poverty that was not Wealth.” This is worded in such a way that you can read that line as, “The poverty that was not (the same as the poverty of) wealth…” Wealth can be seen as a worse poverty because it is always in danger of loss. Wealth is only here in passing, and will have to deal with a "reverse" eventually. The art of want, on the other hand, has less to lose. Once you have mastered the meagre, any "reverse" is for the better.  

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

What I see not, I better see—

What I see not, I better see—
Through Faith—my Hazel Eye
Has periods of shutting—
But, No lid has Memory—

For frequent, all my sense obscured
I equally behold
As someone held a light unto
The Features so beloved—-

And I arise—and in my Dream—
Do Thee distinguished Grace—
Till jealous Daylight interrupt—
And mar thy perfectness—

      -Fr869, J939, 1864

I found this poem to be very difficult to parse. One thing that helped was finally realizing that memory is the subject and not the object in the line, "No lid has memory." It's not saying that closed eyelids have no Memory, but rather that memory has no eyelids to close. In other words, you can shut your eyes to the world out of faith, but you can't shut off your memories. It seems like a small thing, but it unlocked the poem for me, like a final piece of a tricky puzzle.

A prose translation of this poem, then, might go like this:

What I do not see with my eyes, I see more clearly through faith. My hazel eye sometimes closes and loses sight, but memory has no eyelids and never shuts. When my senses are shut off, I can still see just as vividly, as if someone were shining a light directly on the beloved face. And then I rise, and in my dream I bestow upon you a singular grace, entering a moment of complete and mutual presence, until jealous daylight breaks in and interrupts.

Let's go through the poem.

What I see not, I better see—

I think of blind Tiresias here who can see the future, or that passage in Frankenstein where the unsightly creature is befriended by the old blind man. Our eyes may deceive us, but if we shut our eyes we are closer to each other, closer to the heart.

Through Faith—my Hazel Eye
Has periods of shutting—

I love that Dickinson uses her own eye color here. Dickinson’s poetry is so all-seeing that its easy to forget that there are specific eyes involved. Dickinson’s eyes have been described by her contemporaries as hazel. She described them herself once as as being the color of "sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."

The color hazel comes from the hazel nut. In this sense, it is born of the woods, just as elsewhere Dickinson has described her hair as being the color of the wren. 

Emily's specific hazel eyes, through faith, attempt to shut themselves against the specificity of the hierarchical world so they can see the inner world of the heart.

For frequent, all my sense obscured
I equally behold
As someone held a light unto
The Features so beloved—-

My friend Darin Stevenson once asked me a question that I am still pondering. What generates the light in our dreams? The light held up to the remembered features of a beloved is like that. It’s dream light, and in it the beloved is illuminated.

“Behold” is a powerful word. What does it mean to “behold” someone's features in our dreams. How can another be held in memory? What is actually being touched?

And I arise—and in my Dream—
Do Thee distinguished Grace—

These lines are wonderful. What does it mean to arise in your dream and do the beloved “distinguished Grace?” If you were dreaming of a lover, what distinguished Grace would you do with Him/Her? And distinguished by/from what? 

It makes my heart beat a little faster these lines, to imagine arising in a dream to do distinguished Grace to a lover.

“Arise” is a word like “Behold,” and “Thee,” and “Grace,” religious words that are here bent back to the lover.

The most enlightening moment for me was that in the dream God and self become interchangeable. The self is the one who is God-like, bestowing Grace on who? Thee. "I arise and in my dream do Thee distinguished Grace." It's God on God action. Who is the lover and who is the beloved?

Till jealous Daylight interrupt—
And mar thy perfectness—

Doing grace to another happens with our eyes shut, in dreams. In daylight though, because of the delusion of our senses, we are separated. There is a profound link here between jealousy (the root of our sins) and the false separation brought about through our senses. There is no jealousy in dreams, only a merging through grace. 

One further thought that is worth keeping in mind I think is that on an immediate level the "Thee" in the poem is the reader, and the distinguished Grace being bestowed by Dickinson upon the reader is the poem itself. We may not be who she was originally beholding in her memory, but through the alchemy of poetry, we are, nonetheless, the recipients of her closed-eye grace.

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Fairer through Fading — as the Day

Fairer through Fading — as the Day
Into the Darkness dips away —
Half Her Complexion of the Sun —
Hindering — Haunting — Perishing —

Rallies Her Glow, like a dying Friend —
Teasing with glittering Amend —
Only to aggravate the Dark
Through an expiring — perfect — look —


    -Fr868,  J938, 1864

The music in this poem sucks you in like a siren song. You can’t stop listening. First there are those strong double Fs that begin the poem, and those Ds coming in with FaDing and Day, echoed in the next line with Darkness and Dip. "D" sounds are like deep dark percussion in Dickinson, the equivalent to bass notes in a piece of music. (I think of Robert Frost here too, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep.")

Then there’s the assonance, that strong ay sound in fair and fade and day in the first line merging, finally, into “away” in the second. The ay of "away" fades away off into the ether. Awaayyyy. 

The quadruple Hs in the second couplet, Half, Her, Hindering and Haunting, create an airy push, so that surprising P at the end of the line, “Perishing,” really pops out at you.

There is no knowing where the music is going with Dickinson because the tenor of the thought is leading the way. Somehow though it is always perfect. For example, look at “look” at the end of the poem. There is no set up for the word. It doesn’t rhyme with anything else in the poem. It defies expectation, but is just right.

Suffice to say that there is "fair" music in spades here, a sublime connection between the musicality of this poem and its content.

Let's look at that content:

Fairer through Fading

This is an oxymoron of sorts. How can something become more beautiful when it is becoming less seen? Its impending absence makes the presence more powerful.

— as the Day
Into the Darkness dips away —

The sunset, when day is fading, is the most beautiful part of it. Dickinson doesn’t go there in this poem, but this is also true of the end of the year. Autumn is the most colorful of seasons. Like a day, and a year, a life ends at its most beautiful point, fairer through fading.

Half Her Complexion of the Sun —
Hindering — Haunting — Perishing —

At twilight, half the day’s complexion is sun, and half dark. 

Hindering —  To hinder is to hamper progress. The day, the life, wants to stay, so it's hindering night. 

Haunting —  We are haunted by the lingering finality of life.

 — Perishing —  Look at how that stark word is set aside like that between dashes, followed by a break between stanzas, like a pregnant pause. What comes during the Perishing? 

The next stanza rallies!

Rallies Her Glow, like a dying Friend —

The subject is still Day. Day is rallying her “glow,” like a dying friend. I remember hearing my grandmother make a hilarious joke on her 90th birthday. I wasn’t expecting it and it seemed to sum up all of her spirit and wit and verve. She was like dying Friend rallying her glow. It was all the more poignant for being so late in the day, so late in the year, so late in the life.

Teasing with glittering Amend —

What is there for the day to amend? Is the day making up for all that noonday sinning with its brilliant “glittering” display of a sunset? Is Emily hinting that it is in atoning that our colors become most rich in tone?

Only to aggravate the Dark
Through an expiring — perfect — look —

This glittering is in defiance to the Dark. It’s flipping off the void. What does it mean to “aggravate the Dark"? It’s almost like some kind of battle of good and evil. Living life to the nth, to the last, is our final battle cry. Aggravate the dark and leave this “light” in a glittering golden display of rebellion,

Through an expiring — perfect — look —

That’s a sunset for you. Or an Autumn trove of trees in New England. Or Emily herself. The end of the poem is the poem's, the poet's, final perfect look, straight at us.

It’s not one that could be predicted. There is no set up rhyme for it, yet it’s perfect.

Glittering.


       -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

My daughter Lucia in the glitter of a sunset

Stay tuned. In the next poem Dickinson continues her meditation on perfection.

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it – Seam by Seam –
But could not make them fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –
But Sequence raveled out of Sound
Like Balls – upon a Floor.

    -Fr867, J937, 1864

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –

That word split is often used with visceral force by Emily Dickinson, as in the start of the the amazing poem of hers which begins, “Split the lark - and you’ll find the music-” Violence can be felt in the very sound of the word: SPLIT. Splat.

The meaning of the word is rich too. There is a doubleness to "split." Something breaks, but in breaking it also gains in possibility. (Read the post on Fr849 for a deeper discussion on the word).

Cleave is another interesting word because it has a doubleness too. Cleave is a contranym, meaning it can denote two opposite things at once. It can mean coming together as well as coming apart. In this case it seems to be the latter, a cleaving apart, but maybe that third line, “I tried to match it,” hints at the other meaning, two parts cleaving back together.

What could have split Emily’s mind? Loyalty to two opposing ideals? There is all of that push and pull between herself and marriage, or herself and religion, or (you fill in the blank.) There is the possibility that something badly wounded Emily, someone close to her, which fractured her mind. To feel betrayed by love might do it.

I tried to match it Seam by Seam.

A few poems back, in Fr860,  we had the phrase “Rime by Rime,” which was a pun of rhyme by rhyme, a sly reference to poetry. I think this is a further echo of the same idea. Seam by Seam is the brain trying to match itself at the seams, but it is also, perhaps, a stitching together in poetry. To sew together verses even as you are dealing with a torn-apart and tattered mind seems to be at the heart of this poem. And there’s the other echo here, which is the pun on "seem." 

“Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'” says Hamlet, as his mind is splitting apart.

Following the word “Seams” is another rich word that is often found in Dickinson’s poems: “fit.”

But could not make them fit.

Words in Dickinson function like planets around a sun. You can’t quite get to the sun, but the definitions and connotations orbiting around it create a solar system. "Fit" is one of those words. See Fr686 for a good example of the complexities of the word “Fit.”

But of course “fit” here goes in two different directions too. The content of the poem is about not fitting, but everything in the form fits perfectly. Just look how perfectly in this poem “fit” rhymes here with “split”!

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –

It is a mind divided. But what is the divide? The poem doesn’t answer that question. Perhaps the divide is between want and need? Or between reason and love? Or (you fill in the blank).

But Sequence raveled out of Sound

Not only do the thoughts not fit together, but they are, somehow, out of sequence.

The word “Sound” here has a few possibilities. Sound as in noise, as in, the thoughts went out beyond sound and into silence, out into no thought.

But Sound can also mean measurement, like sounding the depths of the water. The sequence goes out beyond measure.

Sound can also mean sense, as in, a sound mind. The mind is going out of the realm of reason. There is no more sequence because reason is gone.

Ravel is yet another contranym of sorts. Ravel seems like it would mean the opposite of unravel, and sometimes it does, but usually it means the same as unravel, as I believe it does here.

But again, like we saw with cleaving apart to cleaving together, and in not fitting being fitting, there is a raveling together here in the form of the poem itself. The brain may be unwinding like a ball of yarn, but there is a winding up the yarn too, you might say, in the tight form and perfect end-rhymes of the poem.

Like Balls – upon a Floor.

These balls must refer to balls of yarn, or thread, being used to try to seam the thoughts together. The startling image here is of a woman attempting to sew, but her mind being so out of sorts that she drops the balls off her lap, just lets them go, where they unroll themselves on the floor. Note that ball is plural here, as if several threads have been dropped. Ball made plural also makes you think of a juggler having dropped all of the balls at once.

There is a letting go of the balls of thought here. The poem, with its contranyms, “cleave,” and “ravel,” is itself a contranym. It can be read as pointing toward a loss or a gain, depending on how you look at it. You can read the poem, in the frame of its poetry, as call to drop the balls and just watch them roll. 

And yet, paradoxically, even as the mind is, for better or worse, coming apart, marvelously, the poem comes together.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

This Dust, and its Feature—

This Dust, and its Feature—
Accredited—Today—
Will in a second Future—
Cease to identify—

This Mind, and its measure—
A too minute Area
For its enlarged inspection's
Comparison—appear—

This World, and its species
A too concluded show
For its absorbed Attention's
Remotest scrutiny—


       -Fr866, J936, Fascicle 39, 1864

I first met Katy Lederer back in the early 90s when we were both at Berkeley and studying under poets like Thom Gunn, Lyn Hejinian and Robert Hass. Katy was one of the first poets to really draw my attention to Emily Dickinson's work. I remember listening to her talk about Dickinson's precise linguistic clarity in the realm of very abstract subjects like faith and eternity in amazement. "How does she do that?"  I still think about that conversation often. 

I've been an admirer of Katy's poetry and writing ever since and I'm very grateful she agreed to write a post for Prowling Bee. Her essay gives us a valuable new way to think about Dickinson's work that extends from the Latinate past toward the language of the future. 

***

We are living in the era of the rise of what are known as the “large language models,” or LLMs. In this context, one might think of Dickinson’s poems, and this poem in particular, as a miniature language model. Though known as one of the foundational lyricists of the American tradition, Dickinson was also a technician; her hymnlike verses can be analyzed as spiritual machines.

In 2017, a group of eight technical researchers published a seminal paper in the field of deep learning titled “Attention Is All You Need.” In the paper, they introduced the transformer, a piece of technical architecture that made the modern incarnation of artificial intelligence possible. The etymology of the word “attention,” which appears in line 11 of Fr866, is worth considering here: from the Latin tendere, it means to reach for, to stretch or extend. Language itself is a tool for such extension; the M-dash, in the
Dickinsonian context, a kind of reaching for, or stretching toward, a phrase.

Latinate words are notably spatial, constructed as they often are of directional affixes and roots. As with “Attention,” the word “Accredited,” in line two of the poem, from the Latin credere, also implies a kind of reaching or extension, in this case of credit outward (ac-). “This Dust, and its Feature—” writes Dickinson in the first of the poem’s three stanzas,

Accredited—Today—
Will in a second Future—
Cease to identify—

The “Dust” in this case might be dust on a piece of furniture, or dust motes floating in the sunlight, or possibly even the dust – composed of sloughed off skin cells or grime – layered on a woman’s skin. One thinks of the expression “dust to dust.” “Dust” in this instance implies mortality, the ephemeral flesh; that which is “Accredited” – as in extended credence, a kind of credit – in the moment, but which will, in due time, “cease to identify,” to exist. What was once a “Future” inexorably transforms into a present; what was expansively alive will become dead. The credit – of life, love, time – will no longer be extended.

In the second stanza of the poem, Dickinson takes us from “This Dust” to “This Mind” – from the material flesh to the seat of cognition and awareness:

This Mind, and its measure—
A too minute Area
For its enlarged inspection’s
Comparison—appear

Here, once again, the poem becomes spatial – literally an “area,” and a measurable one at that. This area is “too minute,” too small to accommodate the “enlarged inspection’s/ Comparison.” As with “Attention” and “Accredited,” the word “inspection” is Latinate, from the root specere, which means to look, a looking into or inside (the prefix in-). Whereas “This Dust, and its Feature” were accredited, extended outward into the material body and into time, “This Mind, and its measure” try to extend inward; but, alas, its “Area” is “too minute,” not big enough. The divine mystery – of consciousness and its desire to in-spect, or look into, itself – cannot find adequate accommodation in the “measure” of the “Mind.” To return to the analogy with LLMs introduced at the beginning of this commentary, the “measure” of the material mind doesn’t scale, its processing power is inadequate to the task of full spiritual self-awareness.

In the third and final stanza of the poem, Dickinson pans out from the interior inspections of the Mind to the expansive vista of “This World” and “its species.” Here, one might imagine a kind of pastoral scene, of animals and plants – also material, a permutation of this “Dust” – grazing and gamboling along the countryside. Who or what made “This World,” full as it is of material, kinetic life? As with so many of Dickinson’s poems, a sense of divine mystery pervades. The poem functions as both a prayer and paean – a Platonic love poem addressed to a Creator. This Creator, unnamed here, is the locus of a remote, “absorbed Attention” that wishes to “scrutinize,” to inspect “This World.” But alas, “This World” is “too concluded,” too disappointingly finite.

Dickinson’s poetics are preternaturally algorithmic. One might describe her poems as linguistic equations, studded as they are by the quantitative dash. But there is a tragedy inherent in Dickinson’s intentionally composed poems – they seem to promise a summation, a kind of balance or totality, and yet there is always an unsettling remainder, an inability to tally the metaphysical reality. The flesh, including the mind and its cognition, is simply not equipped to make sense of the material context in which it finds itself, no matter how strenuously it extends itself outward or attends. Attention in this case – even that of a writer as sensitive and attuned to the subtleties of language as Dickinson – is simply not enough, or possibly too much.

      -Katy Lederer

        "In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum

        I am waiting, like an animal,

        For poetry."   

        from "That Everything's Inevitable" by Katy Lederer

Expectation — is Contentment —

Expectation — is Contentment —
Gain — Satiety —
But Satiety — Conviction
Of Necessity

Of an Austere trait in Pleasure —
Good, without alarm
Is a too established Fortune —
Danger — deepens Sum —


    -Fr865, J807, Fascicle 38, 1864

For some reason when I first read this I heard Julie Andrews as Maria Von Trapp, or maybe Mary Poppins, sing-saying it. “Children, repeat after me, "Expectation — is Contentment —…”

Come to think of it, there is something Governess-like in Emily Dickinson.

This one is tough syntactically from the very first line:

Expectation — is Contentment —

Is contentment the subject or object here?

Does this line mean that (our) Expectation is (to eventually have) Contentment?

Or does it mean that expectation itself, that is to say, anticipation, is where one finds true contentment?

Which of these two different ideas is meant by Dickinson? It seems like she must mean one or the other, right? But Dickinson does this kind of syntactically slippery thing all of the time, so we suspect she means both. This poem works either way that you interpret the line and both play into its meaning. 

In the two ways to read this line, we actually have one entire idea, which is this: 

We have the expectation that if we have what we want, then we will become content (first meaning). But anticipation is, ironically, where one may find true contentment (second meaning).

In the way that I processed the poem, the second meaning didn't kick in until I’d read it all the way through once. It’s like a coda, but one that you have to go back to the beginning of the poem to get. 

OK, let's work through the rest of the poem.

Expectation — is Contentment —
Gain — Satiety —

We have an expectation of contentment, and that if we gain we will be satisfied.

But Satiety — Conviction
Of Necessity

But satiety (feeling full) brings a conviction of a Necessity. Conviction and Necessity are both strong words. Necessity. Of what? 

Satiety brings a...

Conviction
Of Necessity

Of an Austere trait in Pleasure —

What does having an austere trait in our pleasure mean? Austerity means something like "restraint of luxuries", so I think an austere trait would be showing constraint.

The next lines comprise an aphorism:

Good, without alarm
Is a too established Fortune —

If there is no alarm in our good, then it’s too “established." Don't allow yourself to get too comfortable, the good Governess is reminding us. You mustn't rest too easily in your feeling of satisfaction, in your happiness. Stay alert to pain.  

Then she looks at the idea from a slightly different angle,

Danger — deepens Sum —

This is the third or fourth wisdom bomb she’s dropped on us in this poem. Danger deepens Sum. This could mean a couple things as far as I can figure it. One is that when we gain, the risk of loss makes our wholeness (sum) more meaningful. It “deepens” it.

Another possibility is that when we are are on the other side of gain, in expectation, the risk we take for that gain deepens it.

That all brings us back around to that first line again. Now that we’ve worked our way through the poem, the first line begins to take on its second meaning. Now we can see that because satiety is suspect, expectation (anticipation) is where true contentment lies.

The argument that Dickinson is making here is difficult for us to get because it's ironic. (I heard Elon Musk say in an interview recently that "fate is the ultimate irony maximizer." Hmm.) It’s not in gain that we find satisfaction, but in expectation. And if we, perchance, find ourselves in gain, well then, it is best to maintain a sense of austerity, which is to say, moderation.

This is the last poem of Fascicle 38. Emily perhaps wrote this poem to remind herself of what is “Necessary,"  but I'm convinced this is aimed for an audience who still needs to learn these lessons. I believe she wrote it for us, the Governess's charges. She’s helping us to understand the wisdom of valuing our desire over the satisfaction of desire, and once we have achieved our desire, the necessity of austerity. We are to keep in mind that danger “deepens the Sum.” 

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff