Just as He spoke it from his Hands

Just as He spoke it from his Hands
This Edifice remain—
A Turret more, a Turret less
Dishonor his Design—

According as his skill prefer
It perish, or endure—
Content, soe'er, it ornament
His absent character.


         -F953, J848, sheet 20, 1865

A strange poem which empties itself as it goes.

You start with something, "it," being spoken from “his Hands.”

Just as He spoke it from his Hands

It’s an evocative image, Hands that speak, almost biblical. Then you get the edifice itself, and, somehow, it remains. It abides, "just as" when it was created.

This Edifice remain—

“Edifice” is an odd word. It’s a bit empty, like saying "house" instead of "home." The house remains, yes, but what about the home? So, here you have something spoken into existence by his Hands, and what was built remains. But for what?

In the second stanza we will find out that his character is absent from the building. I’m thinking of Dickinson’s line, “Nature is a haunted house.” Somehow, in this poem, creation itself is called into question.

You get more clue into this “absent character” in the next line.

A Turret more, a Turret less
Dishonor his Design—

This edifice turns out to have turrets. This would make it a castle. A castle implies a king, a kingdom, and a whole hierarchy. It also implies protection. Turrets were originally built for guards, so that they could watch out for incoming enemies.

But turrets are ALSO ornamental. This poem plays with both ideas because in the second stanza adding a turret "ornaments" the builder's absent character.

Okay, so we have a structure that is both beautiful (ornamental) and functional (protects), and is "perfectly" made as is. So we need not add any more to what is already there, right?

But hey! Maybe we want to? Maybe we want to add to the design. God is like a busy father then, absent and not listening to our ideas.

Then we get the difficult second stanza:

According as his skill prefer
It perish, or endure— 
Content, soe'er, it ornament
His absent character.

This is a maddening stanza. I have made sense of it in my mind in several different ways, but I don't yet have an elegant solution.*  

My (current) best guess is that whether the Builder wishes his Edifice to Remain is at his discretion. It perishes or endures, according to what his skill prefers. If it goes, it goes, but if it endures then He is content that the edifice ornaments his absent character. 

The poem hinges a bit on the phrase "absent character." Is the emphasis here on "absent" or on "character"? 

Presumably the Builder wants his character to be seen because it is a good. But that word "absent" won't quite let you have that reading. There is something missing from the edifice. It's like a shell without the owner in it. 

So I don't know. 

The edifice shows character, perhaps, but also, more disturbingly, absence. 

In that sense, you may see this very poem as an edifice that points to the Lord's absent character. This poem, from this perspective, is punk, heretical. I take it as a push-back against a Lord of the manner.

If I was going to try to get at this poem from a biographical bent, this is what I would surmise: Emily’s father, Edward Dickinson, was famously controlling about his family and how the house was designed and kept. Remember that Emily lived in this house her whole life. There must’ve been some power dynamics over taste. Like many fathers (and especially back then), Edward Dickinson was a controlling presence, and yet was often absent.

***

That’s one take on the poem. It's a well-considered possibility. But I also can see there is a more surface-way to read this poem too.

This poem could be read as being about the tension between faith in the perfection of divine design and uncertainty about what that design actually means. We might believe that everything has been made according to a divine plan. But we cannot necessarily see that plan. We can only look at the world and try to understand the character of the being who made it. (A bit like a poem with many meanings).

In this interpretation, “Content, soe'er,” might mean that the structure remains content regardless. Its purpose is simply to testify to its creator, whether it perishes or endures. Yet the creator remains absent, leaving us to decide what the testimony means.

***

If you look at the recent batch of poems, and especially the ones that Dickinson wrote on this same piece of paper, sheet 20, you'll see that they all have these kinds of layered meanings in them. All levels of these poems can be useful depending on your needs, but it's worth remembering that, for the careful reader, there is often a more subtle and compelling reading lying in wait below the first. And sometimes that second one is a brazen reversal.

Is this poem more about the perfection of the King's Castle as it seems to be at first, or is it more about the absence inside the house that keeps it from being a home?


               -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

* I was listening to a podcast recently and a mathematician was talking about "style" and how the biggest compliment you could give a mathematician is to say her solution was elegant. This can also be true with Emily Dickinson. Her poems can be compared to difficult-to-solve math problems. An elegant solution to the poem must take account of all the words and their syntax and then present it in a way that is easy to follow. One of the most elegant Dickinson problem solvers I know of, by the way, is Susan Kornfeld, the creator of this blog. Hi, Susan. Thanks for letting us add turrets.

P.S. I picked up an Emily Dickinson Selected Poems at the local Sunnyside Book Swap a couple days ago. The selection had a forward by Billy Collins. I stood at the swap and read the intro and then put the book back for some lucky reader. The biggest takeaway I got from Collins' intro was his observations on the way Dickinson played the Anglo Saxon language off the Latinate for effect in her poems. The current poem at hand is a good example. "Just as he spoke it from his hands" is very Anglo Saxon. But the second line has a very different Latinate sound, "The Edifice remain." It is a subtle clue as to the meaning of the poem for me. The first line is full of substance. The second, like the more flashy and formal Latinate, is emptier. The home, in other words, has become an edifice.  

P.P.S. There are some good notes on this poem in the comments. See below. 

Finite — to fail, but infinite to Venture —

Finite — to fail, but infinite to Venture —
For the one ship that struts the shore
Many's the gallant — overwhelmed Creature
Nodding in Navies nevermore —


           -F952, J847, sheet 20, 1865

I had a teacher at Colorado State University, Dr. Richard Henze, a puckish professor with a gleam in his eye. He liked to read every text against itself, not as a practitioner of Deconstruction or some other critical stance, but simply because he enjoyed discovering the possibilities within a work of literature. It was a fertile ground for learning how to read Emily Dickinson. Her poems so often can be read against themselves. They “dwell in possibility.”

This poem is, for me, a good example of this.

 
Seen from one angle this poem is saying, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” To fail is finite. Failure has an endpoint. You try something, it doesn't work. But to venture is full of infinite chance. The moment you dare to attempt something, you enter a realm of possibility that has no clearly defined limits. The value of acting lies not so much in its outcome, but in the willingness to risk an outcome.

In this interpretation of the poem the strutting ship is the hero that made it against all odds. Rah rah! Go, Navy!

But I think this is missing an essential asymmetry in this poem between the one person who succeeds and the many who risk everything and disappear. At the end of the poem I think Dickinson's sympathy is less with the one who made it and “struts the shore” than it is the many gallant who tried. I think you can read it as a call against taking action.

Finite — to fail, but infinite to Venture —

“Infinite to Venture” is very similar to dwelling "in possibility.” We are dwelling in the infinite possibility of venturing, without actually venturing. It's being open to all possibilities without having to attach to any. It’s not in actually doing the thing where infinity lies, but in the possibilities being left open. To dwell in infinite possibility, then, means to not act.

This is akin to the Tao Te Ching’s “non-action.” From Google: “In the Tao Te Ching, "not acting" or "doing without doing" is known as Wu Wei (无为). It does not mean laziness or sitting completely still. Instead, it means acting in alignment with the natural flow of the universe rather than forcing, fighting, or trying to control outcomes.”

So I would like to venture this Taoist reading as one among the poem's infinite possibilities.

In the Rah Rah version of the poem, the hero is the strutting ship. In the Tao reading of this poem, the emphasis is on noticing instead, as I believe Dickinson does, the "nodding navies nevermore."

Seen in this light, this is an anti-war poem.

For the one ship that struts the shore

A ship strutting is a comical image. The verb “struts” makes the ship seem almost absurdly proud of itself. There is a connotation to the word "strut,"an implied criticism of how we understand success.

Many's the gallant — overwhelmed Creature

Now we turn our attention to the missing ships, the many brave creatures who were overwhelmed.

Gallant is a key word. These aren't cowards. They're courageous and noble. But they have been overwhelmed. The word Creature adds pathos to the scenario. It strips away the glamour of the venture. These are vulnerable creatures subject to forces greater than themselves.

Nodding in Navies nevermore —

This is a haunting line. Nodding suggests the bodies of sailors bobbing in the water, or the sunken ships rocking beneath the waves. And the word Navies scales up the tragedy. We're no longer imagining a single unlucky voyage but a maritime graveyard, a history of lost ventures. And the word “nevermore,” like it does in Poe’s famous poem The Raven, gives us a sense of finality. These creatures will never return. The stakes were too high.

The repeated N sounds in Nodding in Navies nevermore create a slow, almost hypnotic movement, as if the lost ships are still rocking in the water. It’s chilling.

So what’s Dickinson trying to tell us? The language of courage and adventure can conceal enormous suffering? The one ship on the shore is a poor consolation for the many lost at sea? Venturing is infinite in its possibilities, but those possibilities come at a terrible price?

It is the lost to whom Dickinson gives her attention. I read it as if she is, like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, stopping the sailor before he leaves shore. Instead of venturing upon your ideal, she whispers in his ear, dwell in possibility. 

        -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S. Looking for more Tao of Dickinson I came across an article with this terrific reminder from Santi Tafarella, 

"The Tao of Emily is not the Tao of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching, for Emily’s Tao includes entering into the Sturm und Drang of passions via the insight that the union and dissolution of opposites is the way of the world, whereas Lao Tzu calls for us to chill our passions via that very same insight."

Unable are the Loved to die

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—

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? 

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

P.S. Prayer of St. Francis: "For it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

Twice had Summer her fair Verdure

Twice had Summer her fair Verdure
Proffered to the Plain—
Twice a Winter's silver Fracture
On the Rivers been—

Two full Autumns for the Squirrel
Bounteous prepared—
Nature, Had'st thou not a Berry
For thy wandering Bird?



       -F950, J836, sheet 19, 1865



I heard Malcolm Guite on the podcast Literary Life recently talking about his new epic ballad, “Gallahad and the Grail.” (4.69 rating on Goodreads!) He was talking about how easy it is to over-determine a poem in the act of “interpreting” it. He made a canny joke, “Lord, lead us not into interpretation.”

So yeah, reminder to self. Sometimes it's best to evade interpretation. The best way to do that is to look at the form, what it is that makes the poem different, and beautiful, formally.

With a poem like this I can take pleasure from it without needing to make sense of it. First there is the sound, the pleasure of words on the tongue. They insist on being read out loud. In fact, this one insisted on being sung. I got out my guitar and a melody immediately presented itself.

This one is SUCH a pleasure to sing. First of all, the rhythm is trochaic, which means each line begins with an emphasized syllable, on a down beat. On top of that the beat you are hitting has a spitting “TW!” sound. The way the sound of “TWICE” opens each couplet of the first stanza, followed by the emphatic “TWO” that begins the final stanza, drives the beat of the song. This emphasis softens considerably when we get to the plaintive final couplet which begins with the softer N sound of Nature, completely changing the tone on the final chordal run.

Another thing this poem does that lends itself to melody are the runs of “feminine” ending rhymes, and especially the repetition of the “er” and “ure” sound. For me that drop in emphasis on the second syllable corresponds to a drop of a note on the musical scale. The melody I gave to this song naturally seemed to descend.

There is also the pleasure of the images. It’s cool imagining Summer personified and proffering “fair Verdure” to the “plain.” And how about that image of a silver fracture on a river?

A third pleasure is in the logical structure. Summer proffers fair verdure which then seems to result in a silver fracture on the frozen river. So the suggestion is, to me, (edging into interpretation now), that Summer is the lover that is offering "fair verdure" and the result is a rejection by winter, leaving one fractured and frozen. It’s a remarkable way to see the progression of summer into winter.

The second stanza does something equally astonishing, but the poetic logic of the poem now says: “Like a squirrel in autumn, I saved and saved for winter, but what did it get me?  Now, alas, it’s spring time and I don’t even have a berry.” I want to interpret that on a personal level too. Like a squirrel in autumn, one invests in someone, invests enough to hopefully get through the tough times together, only to result in spring coming up with no fruit from the relationship. 

It's got to have a personal meaning, right? Because if you are just talking about actual seasons, then it doesn't really make sense, because there are always berries for the birds. The song-bird is the poet and she is searching for sustenance.

In looking at the poetic logic of the poem the meaning begins to become more clear. But there's more, we are sure of it, so we look for clues. That brings us to the next great pleasure in reading a Dickinson poem, the wrestling match with meaning. With Dickinson there is almost always the pleasure of the riddle. It's akin to the pleasure of solving a mystery.

This guessing is precisely where interpretation can start to become, perhaps, too personal. Lord, lead me not into interpretation. So I’ll ask you for yours instead. Here's my first question for you. Why are there two sets of seasons in this poem? And why do we have "Twice" given to us twice, followed by "Two," and then end on zero, on no berry, none? 

Perhaps there is a personal reason for these two sets of seasons for Dickinson? But any biographical interpretation begs a question. How personal are Dickinson’s poems in the end? Did Dickinson intend for her poems to have universal resonance or didn't she? My understanding is that she was able to write in both personal and universal modes simultaneously, and even the most obscure poem is meant, in part, to be for a general audience. Using the word “Twice,” for instance, is meant to invoke a specific meaning for a reader. But what? What is “Twice” doing here then, on a broader level?

Another question. Where is spring in this poem? How come it is missing? 

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff


P.S. Here's the song as it came out when I picked up my guitar. 

P.P.S. Here's an acrostic written last week by one of my HS students. I thought it put the over-determination problem beautifully. 

Letting

All

Unique 

Readers.

Amusingly

Scholars

Create

How

Readers

Exactly

Imagine

Bright

Excellent

Reading.

Before He comes we weigh the Time!

Before He comes we weigh the Time!
'Tis Heavy and 'tis Light.
When He depart, an Emptiness
Is the prevailing Freight.

      -F949, J834, sheet 19, 1865


The heaviness of emptiness. Or, like Dylan sings, “Sometimes, the silence sounds like thunder.” Or, like Milan Kundera’s great title puts it, “The unbearable lightness of being.”

Before He comes we weigh the Time!

What does “He” represent in this poem? A lover? God? For simplicity’s sake, let’s just say “Love.” Without Love…

'Tis Heavy and 'tis Light.

This poem, itself, is both heavy and light. It has a heavy subject matter but is short and light. ‘Tis weighty, but sleight. It makes for a jarring contrast, like a jaunty pop song that expresses the deepest longing.

When He depart, an Emptiness
Is the prevailing Freight.

The poem shows the twin sides of anticipation for arrival and grief of departure. They are, in a sense, one in the same.


             -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S. Occasionally I will pick up an anthology of poetry called The Rattle Bag (edited byTed Hughes and Seamus Heaney) and read a random poem from it. Just after writing this post I seredipitously opened it to the following poem, 

Could mortal lip divine

The undeveloped Freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.

It's a much later Dickinson poem which I hadn't seen before, but I was struck right away by the similarity to, and difference from, the poem at hand.  It's fascinating the way Dickinson comes back over and over again to the same words and ideas, but with new shades of meaning. The mortal lip divine. 

Spring is the Period

Spring is the Period
Express from God—
Among the other seasons
Himself abide,

But during March and April
None stir abroad
Without a cordial interview
With God—


     -F948, J844, sheet 19, 1865


Spring is the Period
Express from God—

The word "Period" is shorthand in Dickinson for the idea that something will come to an end. This is a poem about beginnings, but a reminder of the end is right there at the beginning of the poem. 

“Express” is another word to consider here. It can mean "to send quickly," but also "to communicate what you think and feel." Both meanings are at play. I also think of another definition of the word, which is to remove milk from a mother's breast using pumping in order to be able to feed it to a baby in a bottle. Spring is God’s expressed milk.

This first sentence sets us up for the second longer sentence:

Among the other seasons
Himself abide,

But during March and April
None stir abroad
Without a cordial interview
With God—

Spring is a gift from God says the first sentence, but the second says that none get there without a friendly, but officious meeting with God.

The word interview is derived from the Middle French entrevue (meaning "to see each other"). The term in 1865 would have been used to describe official meetings. Neither of the two most common modern definitions, the job and journalistic interview, existed back then in the way we understand them today.

Why does Dickinson call an encounter with God an interview rather than a meeting or communion? It turns God from an abstract theological presence into something like the top brass of spring, interviewing the natural world before letting it loose.

The word "cordial" has the connotation of being friendly but formal. “None stir abroad / Without a cordial interview / With God.” could merely mean that everything that comes out into the world in spring has a direct encounter with God, but the tone of the words "cordial interview" hint at something more going on. “Cordial," with it's bureaucratic tone, carries some irony. 

“Cordial” can have that slightly too-polite quality. It's warm and friendly, but also perhaps the kind of phrase you'd use about a meeting with someone who has power over you. It might be a stretch, but I can hear a little menace in the understated irony of this word, like in the Godfather: 

"Don Corleone has requested 'a cordial interview' with you before you leave, signore." 

I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here, but I do think there's a hint of a power dynamic in the poem. 

Mostly though the term "cordial interview" is light and humorous. God is conducting interviews with the things that are about to emerge, the flowers and birds. If, after a long difficult winter, God's going to have a little talk with us in March or April, what does He say? The reader of this poem, along with the birds bees and butterflies, is being interviewed. God asks you, "So, what are your summer plans?"

Or, to quote the poet Mary Oliver, "What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Maybe Dickinson had this kind of cordial in mind as well?

P.S. The phrase "none stir abroad" reminds me that Emily did not go abroad. She stayed at home, like a flower that refused the cordial interview and kept her own company instead.

P.P.S. I like how the emphatic "d" at the end of God seems to be the impetus for the rhyme scheme of this poem. If you've spent much time in church, you've might've heard how preachers like to emphasize that "d" when they say the word "God." In the Midwest, where I grew up, the sound was sometimes given its own syllable. GawDah. 

In this poem we get a great rhyme scheme with that emphatic ending D sound, which acts like a bass drum thud driving the rhythm. 

1 and Duh

1 and Duh

1 and 2 and 3 

1 and Duh

1 and 2 and 3

1 and Duh

1 and 2 and 3

1 and Duh

D is an interesting letter, meaning-wise. It is generally thought that the letter started out as an pictogram of "door," and you can see it if you look at the letter. It does look like a door, albeit a hobbit-door. 

But the sound of the letter is more like a door shutting than opening. Thud! If you turn the sound of it way up, like, say, in the word "DeaD," it's scary. It carries a touch of terror when that closing door sound comes so emphatically at the enD.

I made slow Riches but my Gain

I made slow Riches but my Gain

Was steady as the Sun

And every Night, it numbered more

Than the preceding One

All Days, I did not earn the same

But my perceiveless Gain

Inferred the less by Growing than

The Sum that it had grown.

-F947, J843, sheet 19, 1865

This is a poem that seems to be taking measure. It's as if Dickinson looked at her growing body of work, nearly 1000 poems by this point, and marveled. She marks the occasion, of course, with another poem. It's a flex meant to encourage the reader to keep going. She's standing on top of a hard-won mountain and looking at those of us at the bottom, as if to say, come on, you can do it! One step at a time. 

I made slow Riches but my Gain

Was steady as the Sun

This poem seems like investment advice, but the poet's sense of wealth is not the same as the banker's. After all, if a gain is as steady as the sun, what does that mean? What does the sun “gain” in its rotation except for the day itself? What does it gain other than itself, steadily? 

What does this have to do with “slow Riches?" Well, for one thing, if you "slow" down you can better appreciate the day. But also, over the course of a lifetime, you accumulate experience.

And every Night, it numbered more

Than the preceding One

The poet is gaining just by living. She gains Days. And if one is living these days doing the labor of love, then one gains an inner well-being that far surpasses any worldly wealth. 

All Days, I did not earn the same

The more worthwhile your days are then the better the experience of your life will be. If you are paying attention, then slowly, without anyone else (including yourself) perceiving the subtle changes, you will suddenly find you have grown taller, so to speak. 

But my perceiveless Gain

Inferred the less by Growing than

The Sum that it had grown.

There’s a catch 22 here. It’s difficult to perceive growth until after you've grown because how else can one measure? (It's like the job applicant that needs a job so he can list the experience he needs to get the job).

So then this final stanza is reminding us to have faith in the process. It's encouragement to keep going the best one can, a little at a time. Some days will be better than others, but don't worry about it, just keep going. 

This poem is filled with the light of the Sun and love for the reader. We are the beneficiaries of Dickinson's daily diligence. The question is, what will we do with it? Garner our own slow Riches.

-/)dam Wade I)eGraff

Dying! To be afraid of thee

Dying! To be afraid of thee
One must to thine Artillery
Have left exposed a Friend —
Than thine old Arrow is a Shot
Delivered straighter to the Heart
The leaving Love behind.

Not for itself, the Dust is shy,
But, enemy, Beloved be
Thy Batteries divorce.
Fight sternly in a Dying eye
Two Armies, Love and Certainty
And Love and the Reverse.

     

        -F946, J831, sheet 19, 1865

This is a difficult poem, so let's break it down slowly. The first thing I notice here is the use of the possessive pronoun “thine.” It gives the poem an immediate tone. The use of thy and thou was already antiquated in Dickinson’s time, but it was prevalent in the Bible and Shakespeare, which was by far the most popular literature in Dickinson’s America. It has a sense of personal devotion to it, and of the divine.

The second thing I notice is the military language; artillery, arrow, enemy, batteries, fight, army. We are in an epic battle and it involves the heart.

The third thing I take note of is the exclamatory gerund that ushers us into this poem: “Dying!”

This is not a word said in jest. It is a word excruciatingly juxtaposed between life and death. It is death made agonizing. In this poem Dying refers both to an actual death and heartbreak at once. It is the feeling of being inside the process of dying of heartbreak. 

The next thing I notice is syntactical confusion in the first four lines. My first question is, what does the “thee” refer to? It takes some close reading to understand that the “thee” points back to “Dying,” as if Dickinson is personifying not just death, but the act of dying itself. She’s addressing a verb.

And what is she saying to the Agent Of Death? “To be afraid of thee/ One must to thine Artillery/ Have left exposed a Friend.”

In order to be afraid of dying, one must lose a Friend in the act. In other words, the fear is in exposing the one you love to your death. If you know that your death will break the heart of someone that loves you (your Friend), then it is much more painful to die. Exposing yourself to love gives death its sting. 

My daughter told me last week in a birthday card that she would be “horrified” to have a different dad than me. This was simultaneously the sweetest thing I've ever heard and terrifying. That paradox sums up the way this poem affects me.

Than thine old Arrow is a Shot
Delivered straighter to the Heart
The leaving Love behind.

These lines make me dizzy with their genius. It’s tough to sum up. First you have to contend with that “Than.” What does "than" modify? I believe it refers to “straighter.” I think these lines are saying that the shot to the heart is straighter “than” it would be otherwise, if love is left behind. (Dickinson’s sophisticated use of grammar sometimes leaves me behind.)

So this is saying, then, that the more you are exposed (to friendship), the quicker the arrow of death hits the center of the Heart. It’s difficult to get at this paradox, but it’s something that can be felt. You grip your literal heart when you think about the pain you feel leaving a loved one when you die, and, worse, that a loved one will feel after you die. The thought itself kills you.

Now that we’ve unraveled some of the syntax and ideas here, at least a little, try going back and re-reading the first six lines out loud, taking note of their tightly controlled meter, form and diction. It’s highly stylized, and yet it could hardly be more authentically felt. 

The next lines keep up the level of difficulty and poetic depth,

Not for itself, the Dust is shy,
But, enemy, Beloved be
Thy Batteries divorce.

The Dust here, I think, is a wry synecdoche of man. Man, made of dust, is shy of love, because love makes death more intense. Without it, death loses its bite and we are no longer so afraid of it. But then, without love, we are just dust!

The highly condensed syntax here goes something like this:

(It’s) Not for itself (for love), that the Dust (the man) is shy, But, (for the) enemy, (Death, because of whom, the) Beloved be (the one that) Thy (Death's) Batteries divorce (from me.)

To put it a little more simply: It’s not for love itself that we are shy, but because the parting from the lover in death will be such an assault. That's what one has to deal with when taken from a Friend in death, and worse, not just being taken from love, but realizing the pain that will be felt by the one left behind.

We feel this more than we understand it intellectually. We feel it in the sound of the words themselves. “Thy Batteries divorce” carries the sense of “battering” and the pain of parting in its plosives: BaTTeries DiVorce.  Also, subtly, the “Thy” here does not feel reverential. It now carries a bit of spit, like the Shakespearean insult. (Shakespeare uses it this way often, like "Thou lily-livered boy" in Macbeth, or, in Twelfth Night, when Sir Toby Belch advises Sir Andrew on how to write a challenge letter to a rival: "If thou 'thou'st' him some thrice, it shall not be amiss." Sir Toby is explicitly telling Sir Andrew to use the word thou as a deliberate insult to provoke a fight.) And finally, "divorce" is such an ugly word in its connotations. We feel all of that in this line, in our gut.

Fight sternly in a Dying eye
Two Armies, Love and Certainty
And Love and the Reverse.

The way Dickinson uses “divorce” to set up the rhyme of “reverse” is, as the kids say, sick.

Okay, we are inside of a “Dying eye" now. There is a fight happening. You might say we are each of us, in some way or another, inside of this dying eye, in a battle-zone, always pushing and pulling toward and away from love in our dance with exposure.

There are two sides. One is going toward the certainty of love. The other is the reverse, going away from the certainty of love. The closer you get to the first, the center of the heart, the more the departure from love, the reverse, is felt. It’s a conundrum that haunts all of us. 

The “Reverse” at the end of this poem is a sliding modifier. It has (at least) two possible referents: Certainty and Love, and there’s a third implied, which is life itself. We want to progress toward love and certainty, but we are always to be met in our advance with that which reverses us from love, which is death. 

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Notes:

1. In the Christanne Miller collected Dickinson we get a note: "Poem sent to Gertrude Vanderbilt who had recently recovered from a bullet wound, after being shot by her maid's rejected suitor on March 20, 1864." Make of that what you will. 

2. 

I confess that I didn't much care for this book, but I include the cover here because Faulkner achieves the same kind of immediacy in the title that Dickinson does in the first line of this poem.