Impossibility, like Wine

Impossibility, like Wine
Exhilarates the Man
Who tastes it; Possibility
Is flavorless—Combine

A Chance's faintest Tincture
And in the former Dram
Enchantment makes ingredient
As certainly as Doom—
'

     — F939, J838, sheet 17, 1865


Adam is on vacation and Tom Clyde has generously stepped in to write the commentary for F939:

*

Enjambment is the name for the poetic technique of continuing a sentence (or phrase) from one line to the next without any intervening punctuation. Think of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Whew. Finally a period.

In this poem Dickinson uses this technique of enjambment on every line but one (the sixth), breaking her sentences in unusual places.

In doing so, she creates a kind of halting, even stuttering, quality to our reading experience. The sentences seem to rotate in the light, glinting and flashing and producing a series of surprises.

We know that Dickinson’s repeated use of this technique of enjambment isn’t accidental. For she is nothing if not meticulous in her craft, choosing meter, rhymes, slant rhymes, Latinate words, Germanic words, alliteration, assonance — any and all of it — for maximum impact. My sense is that she chose to use repeated enjambment in this poem because it provided the best way for her to convey her theme: the step-by-step, endlessly surprising, iterative process by which we evaluate what is possible for us in this life.

*

Let’s start at the beginning and work through the lines one by one.

At the end of the first line, a reader may, for a moment, think Dickinson has already presented the crux of the poem:

Impossibility, like Wine

Two unlikely things, joined!

An abstract concept — impossibility— and a material object — wine. Is this a poem about how the internal and the external worlds meet, then? Is this comparison the riddle we will spend the rest of the poem working out?

*

But then our eyes drop down and we read the following line.

Exhilarates the Man

There, with that striking capital “E,” Dickinson gives us a verb that makes us realize she is still completing the sentence; there’s more to the thought than we first thought.

It turns out that Dickinson wants us to notice how impossibility “exhilarates” a person. That’s right — just as wine does.

As we surmised from the first line, impossibility and wine are two things which are unlikely to be paired. But their pairing has nothing to do with them having similarities in and of themselves. It has to do with the effect they have on a person (namely, exhilaration).

*

And then, at the end of this line two, she does it again! Another enjambment — and the sentence surprises us with a new turn.

Exhilarates the Man
Who tastes it;

Ok. “”Who tastes it.” Now we have finally got the full import of the sentence, broken up as it is over three lines of poetry. The man who tastes impossibility is exhilarated, and it is an involuntary reaction, like getting drunk on wine.

After these two enjambments, which as we have seen also functioned as two false endings, we come to our first punctuation, a semicolon.

*

After the semicolon, on the same line, Dickinson tacks on a new word: “Possibility.” Which of course begins a new enjambed sentence!

Who tastes it; Possibility
Is flavorless —

Ok, ok. We get it. Our mind readjusts our frame on the poem once again. Now we come to understand that “impossibility” is being compared not so much to “wine” (that was only Dickinson’s preliminary point, to establish their similar effect). Rather, it is being compared to — contrasted with — “possibility.”

Tasty, “exhilarating” Impossibility vs. “flavorless” (dull?) Possibility.

But wait… possibility isn't dull. Where is she taking us now?

*

And the enjambments continue with with the word “Combine” tacked on to the end of that same line:

Is flavorless — Combine

“Combine,” Dickinson orders us. Combine what?.

She skips down, more than merely a line, but now all the way to the beginning of a new stanza.

We have arrived at enjambment number four:

— Combine
A Chance's faintest Tincture

Ah-ha! Now we are being instructed to do something. We must combine a tincture of chance with our existing imagination.

And in the former Dram

This sixth line is the only one in the entire poem that is not enjambed, not halting or stuttering. “And in the former Dram“ doesn't wrap around from the line above, and it could stand as the beginning of its own sentence.

Why would Dickinson offer up that phrase about the “Dram” so cleanly? Perhaps it is because this is exactly the medicine that the poem offers to the reader.

A dram is a shot of whisky or spirits. So Dickinson is conjuring the image of drinking again, but this time it is a more sober experience, existing firmly in the realm of possibility. This time it seems less involuntary too, less Dionysian. A dram suggests a deliberate, almost medicinal, taking of spirits.

We keep reading:

Enchantment makes ingredient
As certainly as Doom—

By the last line, after all these stuttering steps (I count six, at least, in the full poem), we have come to realize that although “Impossibility” may instantly exhilarate, “Possibility” is more complicated, and often more lasting in its effect. An encounter with possibility leads us through a series of steps:

First, it adds a flavorless “tincture” to our imagination.

Second, this becomes a kind of “enchantment” in our head.

Third, this state of “enchantment” creates a bona fide new “ingredient” (note that the move from tincture to ingredient is not just a quantitative but a qualitative change). It might be thought of as medicinal.

And, step four, this new ingredient is experienced as “certainly” as we experience the sensation of “Doom.”

Doom works on our fears. Chance works on our hopes. But both are based on the consideration of real-world consequences.

*

Reading it through with these steps in mind, it strikes me that this poem functions as a kind of recipe for getting yourself motivated.

Add one tincture of chance and then wait 30 seconds...

You now have enchantment.

Which, when mixed, gives you… a special ingredient.

You know the one. It tells you that the idea of yours… is so crazy it just might work!

What you do now is up to you.

The way I read it, this marvelous little poem is extremely encouraging. It seems to give us a step-by-step recipe for success.

Don’t just glug the impossible! Dickinson is cautioning us. Instead, mix up some of that real stuff, the possible.

             -Tom Clyde

RIP Dolly Parton

The following Emily Dickinson poem was in Dolly Parton's autobiography:

If I can stop one Heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again,
I shall not live in Vain.

Dolly Parton's market E-score (engagement score) for popularity is a perfect 100, the highest of any celebrity. A large part of this appeal was the ethos of kindness that Parton lived by, which is summed up beautifully here by Dickinson. 

The poem takes the measure of both artists and I think it is fair to say that neither lived in Vain. 

Those who have been in the Grave the longest—

Those who have been in the Grave the longest—
Those who begin Today—
Equally perish from our Practise—
Death is the other way—

Foot of the Bold did least attempt it—
It is the White Exploit—
Once to achieve, annuls the power
Once to communicate—


      —F938, J922, sheet 17, 1865


I'm on vacation for a few weeks so I asked a friend of the Bee, Tom Clyde, if he would fill in for the next few poems and he graciously agreed. Here is Tom with some clarity on F938.    

I think of this poem as an argument about death and the limits of language.

In it, Dickinson leads her readers, one logical step at time, towards a shocking conclusion.

By the end of the poem, words are no longer adequate. More than that, they cease to be meaningful — which is, in fact, the conclusion of her argument about the nature of death as well.

This confluence of form and content is remarkable.

As we so often see in Dickinson’s work, the alignment of meter and sound to meaning is done with the utmost care. I would suggest that this is why her poems so often linger with us, long after their syllables and sounds have faded from our minds.

So let’s try to figure out how Dickinson does it, shall we? To do so, I propose that we consider the technical aspects and thematic content of this poem one line at a time.

*

First line:

Those who have been in the Grave the longest—

The first thing we notice as we enter the poem is that Dickinson begins in a trochaic meter — that is, she opens with “THOSE who,” a two-syllable unit with a stressed beat followed by an unstressed beat. DA-da.

THOSE who HAVE been IN the GRAVE the LONGest—

As we read on we soon discover that not only this line, but the entire poem, continues in this insistent, surging, trochaic meter.

This is not a tentative poem. Dickinson has something to say. (And we are here for it!)

The first line has 10 syllables, dimly evoking the pentameter that Shakespeare uses in the sonnets. But here the five two-syllable units are slapping at us, like waves hitting a rock, as opposed to the more gently lapping iambic pentameter the Bard usually employs.

The content of this opening line also slaps us into attention. For “Those who have been in the Grave the longest” conjures a grim image in the back of our minds, doesn’t it? “Those” are no doubt mere skeletons now. Perhaps some hair and fingernails laying about? Have the planks of their coffins completely collapsed onto them at this point?

Let’s see where she goes from this ghastly opening:

Those who begin Today—

Yikes! It doesn’t get any easier with the second line.

The same trochaic insistence, and now perhaps a warning to the reader: “Today”! She doesn’t contrast those who have been in the grave the longest with something benign… like, say, “the recently departed.” Instead, she leaps to the present tense.

It could be me! It could be you! It is happening now, in 2026, as much as it did for Dickinson in 1865.

We read on to find out what Dickinson sees as linking those in the grave longest and those dying today:

Equally perish from our Practise—

All living things are equal in death. It will come to everyone, high or low. Horace: Mors ultima linea rerum est. Death is the final limit for everything. John Donne: "Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.” Here Dickinson draws from a long tradition, with which she would have been familiar, noting the leveling nature of our mortality.

When Dickinson uses the word “practice” in this line (we equally perish “from our Practice”), this may be read as a reference to the habits of life, the “practice” of daily living. We perish from it, in the sense that we are taken away from it.

Or, alternatively, we might read this line about perishing from “our Practice” as saying that we perish from it in the sense of dying because of it. As we go about our lives, experiencing all the exigencies of circumstance, something will inevitably happen because of our choices. Might it be a pile-up on the highway? A cut leading to an infection? The onset of cardiovascular disease? In effect, we can expect to take a wrong turn at some point — which will lead to our perishing.

I favor the former reading of this word “from” — that is, that we perish from in the sense that we are taken away from our “Practice” of life. But both readings of this line have interesting implications, which inform the fourth and final line of this first stanza:

Death is the other way —

I love the vagueness and mystery of this line. A path leads another way, around the corner, just under that leafing branch, into the shadows, and — we are gone.

In this sense our existence is always binary: death is the other way than living. It is both a departure (again, from as taken away) and it is a consequence (from as because). In both, there is no other way but this other way.

What else need be said? Indeed, nothing more sensible can be said, since this “other way” of death confounds reason — scratch that, it subsumes reason. It eliminates thinking and consciousness and reason — and therefore language — altogether.

*

The second stanza likewise follows the trochaic meter of the first. In terms of syllables it runs 9-6-9-6 (where the first stanza ran 10-6-9-6). So Dickinson begins to approach the common or “hymn” meter she usually writes in (8-6-8-6, iambic), but never quite gets there. She stays in that insistent, slightly elongated rhythm.

At the end of the first stanza, as we have seen, we are aware of the ineluctable nature of death, and also its power as a force that levels equally. Now in the second stanza she hints at more specific and futile attempts to surmount death— the folly of real people trying.

Foot of the Bold did least attempt it—

The odd thing about the adventure of death? Everybody attempts it. So you can’t point to the most bold and courageous and say that they really truly gave it a go, more than anyone else. In fact, this line made me realize that the most bold will probably be the ones to fight the hardest to live, and so they will be the most reluctant to face death! Dickinson distills this profound observation down to a single line: “Foot of the Bold” — we can imagine the tough, calloused foot of an Odysseus or a Sojourner Truth — will, surprisingly, be the least likely foot to test those waters.

Foot of the Bold did least attempt it —
It is the White Exploit—

Here Dickinson uses this word “White,” which she employs occasionally in her poems for very distinct purposes. At the end of the long poem, “I cannot live with You” (F706), she writes of “that White Sustenance — / Despair.” There she seems to imply a quietude, an acceptance of remaining forever slightly removed from her beloved (“the Door ajar”), as if that particular despair has a relationship to silence and oblivion.

Why would silence and oblivion present as Whiteness to Dickinson? Perhaps because white is every color reflected back at us? Perhaps it contains everything to her? As she asks in another poem, “Dare you see a Soul at the ‘White Heat’?” (F401)

It also occurs to me that white is the color of ash. Ash evokes death, and is silent. When we see ash, we know that Vesuvius has spoken and now is done.

Yet another way to read this phrase, “the White Exploit” — an entirely different way — is to imagine death in Dickinson’s mind as a destination like the North Pole or the South Pole. If we read it this way, then “the White Exploit” here may be intended to suggest a great journey (with colonialist, um, coloring).

Recall that Edgar Allen Poe published his short novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in 1838, when Emily Dickinson was eight years old. She probably read it, or had it read to her, as a girl. In that novel the protagonist and his shipmates land on a misty land surrounded by milky-white seas somewhere near the South Pole. Drawing from the fervor for Polar exploration in that century, Poe evokes the thrills and danger of approaching the very limits of the known world.

In the mid-19th century the concept of Whiteness certainly informed the energy of colonial exploits across the globe. What more “bold” realm to conquer and subdue than death?

But even if “White Exploit” carries this secondary, racially-charged meaning (I am not convinced it does, but I thought it was worth considering), then Dickinson surely intends it ironically. For in the final two lines of the poem she offers a reality check to such delusions (and a rejection of any racist, culturally-driven nonsense).

The poem concludes:

Once to achieve, annuls the power
Once to communicate—

Good luck with that, she seems to be saying.

Achievement annuls communication; your exploit was for nothing.

*

A brief story. Many years ago, when I was tucking my son into bed (he’s now 22, but I think he was about 6 at the time), we stumbled into a conversation about death that I never forgot…

“You know, George,” I offered. “A famous writer named William Shakespeare once called death ‘the undiscovered country’.”

“Why?”

“Because none of us really knows what happens after we die.”

I thought that was it, but then I noticed that my son was still deep in thought, looking past me. When he finally spoke, he did so in a hushed, serious voice:

“Shakespeare’s wrong, Dad.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. ‘Cause death has been discovered. It’s just that nobody has been able to report back!”

*

That conversation came to mind when I read these last two lines of this poem.

Once to achieve, annuls the power
Once to communicate —

That final dash!

The rest is silence.


Nobody can report back. George was right. That’s just it.

Thus Dickinson offers us a totally unsentimental and unsparing take on death. (What would Dickinson have had to say to her fellow poet W. B. Yeats, with all his interest in the occult? I suspect she would have had very little.)

It is, of course, not unusual for Dickinson to end a poem with a dash. But the one here, in effect cutting off any further “communication,” feels particularly poignant, doesn’t it?

It is a dash which leads to blank page.

It is the conclusion of an argument which says, good luck with that.

The confluence of form and content is seamless.

Long dead or dying today, foot of the bold or foot of the meek…it’s coming for you. And once you achieve it, this other way of death annuls all power to communicate. It is true to itself and no other.

*

But I don’t want to end without acknowledging that there is a positive aspect to this conclusion too. Dickinson’s bracing examination into the nature of death and the limit of language reveals, in a kind of negative afterimage, the joy of being alive.

We can still communicate now! Dickinson demonstrates that to us in this very poem.

When you think about it, that’s what the Prowling Bee readers are doing on this blog, even in the face of our inevitable, impending deaths (sorry).

And very, very rarely, someone can even communicate past death, as Dickinson has, paradoxically, managed to do with this same poem.

In the words she wrote by hand on a scrap of paper all those years ago, Dickinson, dead long ago, is still slapping us awake. She is talking to us, this very instant, about the miracle of being alive.

     -Tom Clyde

Antarctica as seen from outer-space 

Not all die early, dying young—

Not all die early, dying young—
Maturity of Fate
Is consummated equally
In Ages, or a Night—

A Hoary Boy, I've known to drop
Whole statured—by the side
Of Junior of Fourscore—'twas Act
Not Period—that died.


        - F937, J990, sheet 16, 1865

“Maturity of Fate.” What an idea. Fate presents a philosophical question, one that is deeply embedded in our mythic consciousness. I think of the 2500 year-old play Oedipus Rex. Oedipus tries to escape his fate, which is, ironically, what leads him to it. Character is destiny. So the deeper question is, can you change your character? Could Macbeth have decided not to kill the king and thus escape the fate the witches predicted for him? These are questions that are fundamental to who we are, and who we may become. This poem points in that direction. It starts with the confusing but concise line,

Not all die early, dying young—

This basically means that just because someone died young does not mean they died too early. It's provocative. What does the poet mean that someone who died young has not died too early?

Maturity of Fate
Is consummated equally
In Ages, or a Night—

These next lines present a quickening. What does it mean that maturity of fate may be reached in a single night? Sometimes we are forced to grow up very quickly due to painful circumstances. The events of a single night can age us as much as living for “ages" will.

As one does when reading Dickinson, I try to use my own experience to understand. I’m thinking therefore of my sister-in-law who became a nurse and at 21 years old was thrown into a kind of hellscape of working in an emergency room in the early days of the Covid pandemic. She was the baby of eight siblings and sheltered and was suddenly asked by circumstances to mature very quickly. Had she not become a nurse, but, say, an engineer, it may have taken "ages" to reach the same understanding of the exigencies of life and death, not to mention being as useful in the face of it. She brought real solace and joy to many who were forced to die terribly alone. Catherine bravely put her life on the line, but fortunately she lived through it, unlike the hero of this poem:

A Hoary Boy, I've known to drop
Whole statured—

Dickinson has known a “Hoary Boy” who died early, but in full stature. “Hoary” is an adjective that means frost-ridden and implies white-haired. The image here is of a boy who is already Old Man Winter.

We don’t know what "Hoary Boy" Dickinson is referring to, but it’s hard not to think of the young men dying in the Civil War during these years. We know that at least one of her friends, Frazar Stearns, was killed in the Civil War in 1862.

—by the side
Of Junior of Fourscore—

The Hoary Boy is juxtaposed against the Junior of Fourscore (fourscore=80 years). One is an old young man and the other is a young old man.

(If it was Frazar Stearns that Dickinson was thinking of, then perhaps she used the word “Junior” for the old man because Frazar was still a Junior in college when he died in battle.)

—'twas Act
Not Period—that died.

A “period” is merely a span of time. It could be any period, really. But an “act” is willful. The young person who dies may have completed something that the older person hasn't. And therefore, “Not all die early, dying young” has a double meaning. Someone can die old while nevertheless dying young, because the thing that mattered, the “Act,” was never given enough time to mature. Conversely, someone can die physically young but have already reached the full completion of their fate.

It takes maturity to "Act" bravely in the face of death. There are young people who are mature enough to understand this, and old people who probably never will.

Frazar Stearns acted. He put his life on the line for the greater good of the Union. This is especially poignant in Emily Dickinson's case because we know that her own brother didn't do this. In fact, Austin paid $500 for a substitute to replace him in the war. 

This is a poem that, if taken to heart, may inspire us to live with the courage of our convictions. 

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Frazar Stearns, 1852

P.S. See the comments below for more on Frazar Stearns.

As Willing lid o’er Weary Eye

As Willing lid o’er Weary Eye
The Evening on the Day leans
Till of all our Nature’s House
Remains but Balcony


      -F936, J1050, sheet 16, 1865  



Leave it to Emily Dickinson to make dying seem like repose on a balcony at the end of a long day. There you are, the cares of the day behind you, overlooking the sunset on the horizon, the house crumbling to dust behind you.

As Willing lid o’er Weary Eye
The Evening on the Day leans

It’s concise the way Dickinson conflates the fall of darkness on the day with a dying eye shutting for the last time. The eye-lid of night falls willingly over the weary eye of the day.

The word “Willing” is telling here. Think about how willingly the eye shuts at the end of a very long day of work. You can imagine a death at the end of a long life of work ending just as willingly. It’s the opposite of Dylan Thomas’ “Rage rage rage against the dying of the light.” 

Dickinson's has set up the syntax so that the verb "leans" follows from both “Willing lid” and from Evening. The lid is leaning over the eye and the Evening is leaning on day. The use of "on" in the second line, instead of "o'er" gives a sense of resting "on." 

The Evening on the Day leans

It's a subtle move, the switch from "o'er" to "on," but "leaning on"  gives us the sense of exhaustion,  as if the Evening is leaning for support. 

Another thing the word “lean” does, once we read the final two lines, is give the idea of leaning over the balcony.

Till of all our Nature’s House
Remains but Balcony

Notice that there is no dash or period at the end of the poem. Though it would be impossible to say whether this was on purpose or not, it's neat how the poem ends without an end-stop, as if the eye of the poet shuts in the midst of looking out beyond the horizon

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

They had a Caspar David Friedrich show at the Met recently that my family and I just so happened to catch. 

(We were on our way somewhere else and I said, let's stop by the Met and see a quick show. It turned out 

to be fortuitous because the Friedrich show was on its way out, and we would've missed it if we hadn't). 

All of us were impressed with it. This one is unassuming, but it was one of my favorites. I think it is 

reminiscent of the poem, especially if you imagine her standing on a balcony.

 

 

As imperceptibly as Grief

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like Perfidy —
A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon —
The dusk drew earlier in —
The morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest that would be gone —
And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.

        
        -F935, J1540, sheet 16, 1865

While researching this poem I came across a fantastic exploration of it by Huck Gutman. I reached out to Mr. Gutman to see if he would be amenable to being the guest commenter on the poem for Prowling Bee and he graciously agreed. 

(Note that there is another version of this poem, a longer "rough draft." I will include it in the post-script.)

Take it away, Huck...

'“As imperceptibly as Grief” is a poem of the seasons. It is a poem of close observation. The particular seasonal moment Dickinson describes is one that we in Washington have just seen pass, the imperceptible juncture when summer ends and fall begins.

There is an artfulness to the poem we may not notice as we read these sixteen lines for the first time. Rereading carefully can bring the verse form to light: if we reread and pay attention, we see the poem is far more tightly structured than we might have imagined on first acquaintance with it.

Though there are no stanza breaks in this poem, it follows Dickinson’s usual pattern of common meter. It is helpful to think of it as being comprised of four stanzas. Why? First, because each stanza is a sentence; second, because in each stanza the second and fourth line rhyme. A master of slant rhyme – words which tend toward rhyme but don’t have the often deadening conclusiveness of full rhymes, words whose sounds echo other words but do not match those sounds precisely – Dickinson rhymes ‘away’ with ‘Perfidy,’ ‘begun’ with ‘Afternoon,’ ‘shone’ with ‘gone’ (with ‘in’ placed in the stanza for good measure as an additional slant rhyme – and with all three echoing the earlier ‘’n’ rhymes of the second stanza) and ‘Keel’ with ‘Beautiful.’

These slant rhymes, you might ask, why are they important if we tend not to notice fully that they are there? Well, first, they tighten the poem: they pull it together more than we ‘know.’ And second, we do know: rhymes are not merely technical things that poets insert to meet some abstract poetic standard, but audible repetitions and variations that make us think that more has gone into the poem than goes into the vagaries of everyday speech. Just as with music, which so often most of us cannot explain, we can hear the rhythms and repetitions and riffs. When we hear these patterns we intuit that a mind is at work making some sense – sometimes only auditory sense – of the “dull miscellany and lumber room” that is our jumbled experience of the everyday. [As long as we are paying attention to sounds and how they tighten our auditory experience, note that in each of these first four lines there is at least one ‘s’ sound and an ‘l’ sound. These sounds recur throughout the poem, creating another series of repetitions that tie the lines together into one whole.]

Extraordinary, those first two lines. I once had a teacher, Ennis Rees, a modest poet and a highly regarded translator of Homer, who said that every poem by Dickinson had a line or two that any poet would give his right arm to have written. In this poem, I dare say, most poets would give their right arm to have written any of the two line phrases. Here is how the poem begins, marvelously:

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away –

One of the most stunning things in Dickinson (and the aforementioned Wallace Stevens) is how often the outer climate in her poems is connected to inner climate. We could tease out a question raised in these first two lines: is the poem about summer, or is it about grief? There is, of course, no answer: the poem is about both.

Thus, the poem begins with a comparison (summer/grief). Both summer and grief lapse so gradually that we do not notice their going. Even “imperceptibly” lapses slowly in line three to “imperceptible,” a movement I have never noticed until now, though I have read the poem for many years[3]. The repetition of imperceptible does not call attention to itself: what happens is that the word itself silently slides into a shorter form and at the same time becomes a more substantial phenomenon, moving from adverb to adjective, from process to thing. The lapsing of summer is barely noticeable, if noticeable at all.

So too with grief, because the metaphor (the ending of summer compared to grief) works both ways. Summer lapses away like grief lapses away. And grief lapses away just as summer does. Summer is linked to grief because the end of summer betokens the slow onset of winter, the displacement of sunlight by darkness. The seasonal shift Dickinson is describing is one of transition, and more specifically, loss.

We easily understand the simile that the leisurely lapsing away of summer is like perfidy – treachery, betrayal – as we likewise understand that the gradual ebb is so unhurried that it doesn’t really seem like betrayal. Put metaphysically, we are betrayed by time, time in which fullness declines; in more concrete terms, time is represented by the glorious days of summer which slip into declining light, declining warmth and declining fruitfulness.

The first stanza is further enriched when we think of grief: it too ebbs away. This lapse is a more perfidious, a greater betrayal. We betray the lives of those for whom we grieve when the slowly slide from our memory. Our loss, their meaning to us, slips away from consciousness.

A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon—

At the turning point, as summer drifts away, all is quiet – how wonderfully Dickinson puts it, the essence of quiet, “quietness distilled” – into long evenings, which come earlier than they did before. (“A Dusk drew earlier in,” the poet tells us several lines later.) Nature seems to pull into herself, “sequestered” in that quiet turning point.

Loneliness and a distance adhere to time as the afternoon is “sequestered,” cut off. No one, no one, can use a word as precisely and yet as surprisingly as Dickinson. It is one of the characteristics of her greatness, one of the marks of her acute consciousness of the world in which she lives. In poem after poem, language shocks us as she uses terms are reasonably familiar in ways that no human being has ever used them before. Often, as in this poem, such words appear in line after line, as with “perfidy,” “distilled,” “foreign,” “harrowing,” “light escape” and here, “sequestered.”

Sequester: – verb (used with object)

1. to remove or withdraw into solitude or retirement; seclude.

2. Law: to remove (property) temporarily from the possession of the owner; seize and hold, as the property and income of a debtor, until legal claims are satisfied.

Origin: 1350–1400; Middle English sequestren (Latin sequestrare to put in hands of a trustee, derivative of sequester trustee, depositary)

The afternoon is removed from the day, its solitude presaged by the use of “quietness distilled.” The afternoon that is taken from both summer’s brightness and from our human sphere is presaged by the “Perfidy” of the fourth line.

The Dusk drew earlier in—
The Morning foreign shone—
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone—

Dickinson is the least sentimental of all the great American writers. This is no paean to the calm of late summer. This is no hymn to a “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,/ Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun,” though it is autumn and not the slow decline of summer that Keats describes in these lines from his great ode, “To Autumn.”

Nor is night a friend, here, as it is for Yeats in his early poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” when twilight falls and “peace comes dropping slow.” Here, as the days shorten, the dusk comes earlier: “drew earlier in” echoes the sequestering of the previous line.

The following day’s later dawn is “foreign.” It comes later than it did in summer: we are not accustomed to the changing of the season which has crept up on us. That dawn is – a surprise, more: a shock – a grace which harrows. The phrase is an oxymoron; that is, grace is conventionally the opposite of harrowing, yet here it is conjoined with it.

But let’s look at the phrase even more closely and consider its concrete elements. Dickinson lived in rural New England: “harrowing” to her would not be, as it is to us, merely a very tough time. Unlike we in the 21st century who are so accustomed to the term that we don’t call to mind the metaphor on which it is based, the Amherst poet would be very familiar with a harrow. To Dickinson and to her nineteenth century rural contemporaries, the term “harrowing” would refer directly, visually, to a field that is being been harrowed, carved up by sharp disks or harsh iron pegs that scour acreage like savage mechanical teeth. Here, it is Grace which harrows – not, as we might expect from what we know of loss, grace which is being harrowed. Grace is what rips into us, the grace (of our loss fading from memory) serving as the instrument of “Perfidy.”

The morning is “courteous” despite the fact that its grace harrows. The grace (think of summer, which disappears with later dawns) like a guest takes its leave of us. Here, we return to the “Grief” of the first line, which slides away, the sliding a “grace” because it allows us to live but a “harrowing grace” because forgetfulness is the most terrifying of things.

And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.

In the final lines the summer slips away. Its passing is not like the things we know in this world: its transit out of our existence is “without a Wing/Or service of a Keel,” neither bird nor sailing boat.

And the summer leaves us behind. We, it turns out, are sequestered in the world, while summer, well, “summer made her light escape/ Into the Beautiful.” Make no mistake, the escape is not light, although it occurs so “imperceptibly” (to return to the first line) that it seems light. The summer escapes into a realm that is not ours: the Beautiful, which we encounter only briefly (if at all) before it escapes from us. It leaves us behind, harrowed, with darkness settling earlier and more thoroughly upon us. That “light escape” refers to the light of summer, which passes easily; meanwhile, possessing consciousness, aware of the passing even if only imperceptibly, that escape of summer is not ‘light’ for us.

The passage of time marks his poem. The season is changing. The “light escape” alludes to not just the imperceptible change from summer to after-summer, but also to that lessening of the light the central lines of the poem refer to. Light has begun the process of leaving. The poem, as beautiful as it is, as finely and delicately observed, is at once a poem of celebration – oh! that we were graced with that light – but even more, it is a poem of tragedy in which we are betrayed, left as foreigners in a land that should be ours, harrowed, adrift in a world which is separate from the beautiful and the natural and the eternal.

We grieve over that loss of summer, even before we know it, as the first line of the poem tells us. Ours is a lapsed world – what is beautiful is no longer ours, time has intruded, and our response to that is grief, which slowly steals over us.

Were I to write a poem about the passing of summer, even if I recognized the slow silent change coming on, I would not be able to achieve either the lightness and courtesy, nor the ‘perfidious…foreign…harrowing… gone’-ness that Dickinson evinces. Extraordinarily often I marvel at Dickinson’s ability to see, in the things of daily life, what I could see if only I were more perceptive.

Dickinson sees what we cannot because she brings to her existence such an intense concentrated focus that we marvel that a human consciousness is capable of this degree of concentration. Were we more courageous and strong-willed, less sentimental, more open to the actuality of our experience, more attentive to each moment, we would see what she does. But it is, at least for me, only by and through reading her poems that I can reach this intense awareness of the world.

In “As imperceptibly as Grief” Dickinson has taken that moment when summer turns a silent and unseen – but not unfelt – corner toward something else, darker, colder, less conducive to life. Call it winter, though winter is far, far off. But she feels it coming, and knows that the bounty of the world has made its “light escape/ Into the Beautiful.”'

        -Huck Gutman

Thank you, Huck. This was a very in-depth and helpful discussion of a difficult poem and it really enriched my understanding of it. I look forward to reading more of your work. 

        -/)dam Wade l)eGraff 

P.S. Thomas Johnson's Note on "As imperceptibly as Grief":

MANUSCRIPT: There are four copies of this poem. They are somewhat variant in text and they span many years. The copy reproduced above is the latest and is in the handwriting of late 1882; it is in the Department of History and Archives, Des Moines, Iowa. The earliest copy is that in packet 92 (Bingham 78a), written in late 1865. It is a semifinal draft in eight stanzas. All three later fair copies omit stanzas 3-6; one may therefore assume that ED permanently discarded them. 

Here is the first "rough draft" of the poem:

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away -
Too imperceptible at last
To feel like Perfidy -

A Quietness distilled -
As Twilight long begun -
Or Nature - spending with Herself
Sequestered Afternoon -

Sobriety inhered
Though gaudy influence
The Maple lent unto the Road
And graphic Consequence

Invested sombre place -
As suddenly be worn
By sober Individual
A Homogeneous Gown.

Departed was the Bird -
And scarcely had the Hill -
A flower to help His straightened face
In stress of Burial -

The Winds came closer up -
The Cricket spoke so clear
Presumption was - His Ancestors
Inherited the Floor -

The Dusk drew earlier in -
The Morning foreign shone -
The courteous, but harrowing Grace
Of Guest who would be gone -

And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel -
Our Summer made Her light Escape
Unto the Beautiful -

These tested Our Horizon—

These tested Our Horizon—
Then disappeared
As Birds before achieving
A Latitude.

Our Retrospection of Them
A fixed Delight,
But our Anticipation
A Dice—a Doubt—


     -F934, J886, sheet 15, 1865


Though Dickinson's poems are full of pain and anxiety, there are many pleasures to be had in them. First there’s the pleasure of the riddle. In this one we are presented with an abstract pronoun, “These," and we have to figure out what it refers to. Who are these “These?” Dickinson's unfixed pronouns open up possibilities. It's ultimately indeterminate. These. 

As so often happens with a Dickinson poem, I don’t get the riddle until I get a clarifying clue in the second stanza: “Our Retrospection of Them/ A fixed Delight” Oh, okay, I see, if our retrospection is a fixed delight, then “these” must either be the dead, or a lost love. Lost love can work for this poem, especially in the idea of having "our Horizon" tested, but the plural "these" leads me to think that it is more likely the dead Dickinson is thinking of here. 

Okay, once we “get” the riddle, we can take pleasure in going back and looking at the poem line by line for the deeper meanings explored therein.

These tested Our Horizon—

The horizon is the furthest we can see, and, since we are talking about the dead, it’s the end of life. The dying “test our horizon” before they disappear. Much could be made of this rich phrase. To test a horizon is to push it, to challenge it. This idea sets up the next lines.

Then disappeared
As Birds before achieving
A Latitude.

Latitude is a measurement for North or South. Is the bird flying north during the summer? Or South to warmer climes? The question underscores the "doubt" that ends the poem, but either way, from our perspective the bird disappears before we can locate it.

So by comparison, the "These" of the first line vanish before fulfilling their purpose. The poem becomes about things that begin to matter but are gone before they become what they might have been.

But latitude also means freedom, as in: "to give someone latitude." That secondary meaning was common in Dickinson’s day. So maybe Dickinson means that the birds disappear before attaining freedom. The birds seem naturally free yet even they vanish before realizing complete liberty. In other words, no life fully reaches unrestricted possibility.

People enter our lives and disappear like birds before achieving a latitude. Death interrupts lives before they seem complete.

Our Retrospection of Them
A fixed Delight,
But our Anticipation
A Dice—a Doubt—

“A fixed Delight” is a chilling phrase. We have this fond memory of a loved one who has departed. But it is “fixed.” It’s set already. And yet, it is still perhaps better than the unknowable future and our doubts about what lies beyond “the horizon” of life. It’s such a Dickinsonian equation. The past is positive, but fixed. The future is not fixed, but is therefore anxious (“Anticipation”) and risky (“Dice”) and possibly disappointing (“Doubt”).

Now it is we, the living, who are left to to test the horizon. Will we “achieve a latitude” before we disappear? No dice.

The pleasures in the poem are in working through the riddle, and then in the cascading revelations that come from grappling with the ideas, and finally, in the poem's music. A poem is a kind of “fixed delight” and this one is particularly delightful, in part because of the interplay of the T and D sound. Read the poem just focusing on those two sounds and you’ll see what I mean. The T and D do a little dance with each other.

And speaking of dancing, Emily used “horizon” for the boundary between earth and heaven in her second Master letter: ‘and you have felt the horizon hav’nt you – and did the sea – never come so close as to make you dance?’

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Of Tolling Bell I ask the cause?

Of Tolling Bell I ask the cause?
"A Soul has gone to Heaven"
I'm answered in a lonesome tone—
Is Heaven then a Prison?

That Bells should ring till all should know
A Soul had gone to Heaven
Would seem to me the more the way
A Good News should be given.

     -F933, J947, sheet 15, 1865

This poem reminds me of John Donne’s famous line, “For whom the bell tolls.” But here the question changes to, “For why the bell tolls.”

Is the bell tolling to extol our pain or our joy? The basic impulse of this poem is that we take the funeral bell to be a bad omen, but, if we are going to heaven, shouldn’t the sound of the bell signal Good News?

This poem is a slippery one though, full of little reversals.

One of the first things I needed to make sense of in this poem is what it means when the S of “Has” in the first stanza turns into the D of “Had” in the second. The poem considers the difference between “A Soul haS gone to Heaven” and “A Soul haD gone to heaven.” That single change of letter changes the tense which makes the difference between a soul haS left, sad, and a soul haD arrived, happy.

Of Tolling Bell I ask the cause?

The response to the question comes not from the tone of the bell, but from the "lonesome tone" of the one being questioned. The “tone” is a reflection of the person, in other words, not the bell.

"A Soul has gone to Heaven"
I'm answered in a lonesome tone—

A follow up question might be: who is it that the poet is asking? Is this some random person out on the street? (It could be, Dickinson's bedroom writing window faced a main road that lead to a graveyard only a few hundred yards from her house, the same one she is buried in now).  Or is the poet asking herself? Who is it that is feeling lonesome?

This seems to be a poem, on the surface, that calls out the hypocrisy of believers, asking them why, if they truly believe, they are treating celebration like a loss. Death should be a celebration! But I think that is a facile reading. If you read the poem backwards, which one should try to do with a Dickinson poem, the "lonesome" reasserts itself and the celebration turns back into what it is for the mourner, a loss. 

Is Heaven then a Prison?

Read frontwards this question is asking us why we would grieve death if it frees us from life. But read backwards, this line points to the living, and to the less-lonely past. Is heaven then a prison? There's a contravalence in this poem, a tension introduced in that telling word, “lonesome.” It's the secret hinge in this poem.

What good is the bell's musical chime of celebration to the one left behind? It serves as a reminder, perhaps, of the hope of something better for the bereaved, but it doesn’t take away the pain of the loss. The pain of loss is so great that it makes the bells themselves sound mournful.

That Bells should ring till all should know
A Soul had gone to Heaven
Would seem to me the more the way
A Good News should be given.

I like the rolling cadence caused by the enjambment of the second stanza, like a bell ringing out. Try it in one breath. It isn’t easy because there is no place to breathe in that stanza unless you make one. This breathless ringing is drawn out even further by the extra half-measure of the feminine-rhyme of "heaven" and "given."  

There’s another subtle reversal in the final two lines. "Good News" immediately evokes the Gospel itself. Gospel literally means good news. So if you read the poem forward then it is saying that the Good News is we don’t die, if we are believers, and therefore should rejoice at the sound of the bells.

But if you've read much Emily Dickinson, then you know the idea of Heaven is a troubled one, to say the least. And if you've learned to read the poems backward, you see that bells perhaps shouldn’t be ringing at all. Silence might be more appropriate.

Christian doctrine says that Heaven is infinitely better than Earth. Human behavior says that death is tragic. Dickinson hears irony in the ringing of those bells. Why is it that believers behave as though they don't actually believe? There’s a gap between belief and behavior that is clear as the tone of the bell.

  

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S. As for the idea of reading a poem backward, note the discussion on the subject in the post for F849. Also, check out this scrap-musing from Emily, about the need to read certain poems backwards: 

Did you ever

read one of

her Poems back-

ward, because

the plunge from

the front over-

turned you?

I sometimes

often have-

many times have-

a something

overtakes the

Mind-