I cannot buy it—'tis not sold—

I cannot buy it—'tis not sold—
There is no other in the World—
Mine was the only one

I was so happy I forgot
To shut the Door And it went out
And I am all alone—

If I could find it Anywhere
I would not mind the journey there
Though it took all my store

But just to look it in the Eye—
"Did'st thou?" "Thou did'st not mean," to say,
Then, turn my Face away.

      -F943, J840, sheet 18, 1865

The language of this poem is that of a classic riddle:

I cannot buy it—'tis not sold—

What is “it?" We are never told the answer to this riddle. We just get “it” repeated four more times. It is repeated so often in this short poem that it becomes conspicuous. What is “It?” It is IT. Dickinson seems to be pointing to the essential but unnamable thing, the IT factor.

The mystery of this poem is a microcosm of the mystery at the heart of much of Dickinson’s poetry. What is “IT?” Is it God? Is it a lover? Is it poetry? You start to wonder if defining “it” isn’t precisely beside the point. The problem of definition is at the root of Dickinson’s poetics.

“It,” in the final stanza, has a face. The poet is looking at “It” in the Eye and then turns her own face away. The word “Eye” leads us to believe it is a human face we are looking at here, and maybe it is, but the singular “Eye” makes us wonder. Still, the “it” is given an Eye and, presumably, a face. “It” moves toward being known in a body. The poem moves in this way from impersonal to personal, toward the final "my Face.”

In the first line we learn, importantly, that this mysterious “It” cannot be bought or sold.

This is worth deep consideration. As a father I can say, without hesitation, that there is literally no amount of money, or anything else, I would trade for my children’s life. The idea of putting a price on them is anathema.

Here I want to suggest a potential connection between this kind of priceless love and the uniquely uncommodifiable property of poetry. Poetry is special, in part, because it generally operates outside of the marketplace. This is especially true of Emily Dickinson, who shied away from publication and fame.

I’ve been reading the novels of Joy Williams, a writer who is a big fan of Dickinson and often reminds me of her. In Williams’ novel “The Quick and The Dead” there is an eight-year-old girl named Emily. From the novel: “Emily didn’t know what pagan was. Possibly she might like to be one. But what she really wanted was to be a triggerman, or a poet. She did not want to work in sales.”

Sounds about right.

There is no other in the World—
Mine was the only one

This is the romantic ideal of there being only one person for you. It’s an ideal seemingly sewn into the seam that binds Dickinson’s poetry together. Who was this “Mine” that was the only one? Maybe we are talking about Sue here, since a copy of this poem was given to her.

But maybe this “Mine,” this “no other in the World” wasn't so much a someone as a something else altogether. It could be, for instance, poetry. A reader commented on the use of “Mine” on the poem before this one, F942, saying that it reminded them of F411, "Mine—by the Right of the White Election!" In other words, it is about vocation. The mystery deepens.

I was so happy I forgot
To shut the Door And it went out

If we are talking about a lover, then this is strange. Is Dickinson saying don’t get so happy with your relationship that you let your lover go out of the house? I don't think so. This sounds more like protect your peace of mind than protect your relationship, doesn’t it?

At any rate the general sense I get here is that you have to stay on guard, which is difficult to do if you get too comfortable and happy.

If I could find it Anywhere
I would not mind the journey there
Though it took all my store

Is “it” beyond place too? It is not (apparently) “Anywhere.”  There is nowhere to “journey” to. So it is beyond place. And, again, it is beyond price, beyond “store.”

But just to look it in the Eye—
"Did'st thou?" "Thou did'st not mean," to say,
Then, turn my Face away.

This is the most difficult part of the poem because of a very odd syntax. If “It” is a relationship, then these lines seem to be saying “Did’st thou” really leave? Because if thou did, I believe "Thou dids’t not mean” to, after which the poet turns away in forgiveness. And maybe that IS what's going on here.

But the way the line fragments is intriguing. 

Thou dids’t not mean,” to say,

seems to be a warning against signifying, against “meaning” itself. “It” doesn’t “mean” anything because meaning, like definition (and price and place and happiness) is a desire outside the realm of "it." When you look for meaning, it is lost.

The final line, “Then, turn my Face away,” becomes, then, a kind of absolute negation of meaning, which, perhaps, is where one paradoxically encounters “it.”

       -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Always Mine!

Always Mine!
No more Vacation!
Term of Light this Day begun!
Failless as the fair rotation
Of the Seasons and the Sun.

Old the Grace, but new the Subjects —
Old, indeed, the East,
Yet upon His Purple Programme
Every Dawn, is first.


     -F942, J839, sheet 18, 1865


There are often several ways to read an Emily Dickinson poem, and sometimes those ways of reading are contradictory. If our goal is to understand the poem, do we try to exhaust the possibilities in the poem and then leave it up to the reader to take it from there? Or do we choose a reading that is meaningful to us? (“Write about what you know”). Do we skew academic or personal? While I understand the dangers of misinterpretations in subjective readings, I’m still inclined to lean in that direction. In a recent post, for instance, Tom Clyde described how a poem resonated with him concerning his mother’s Alzheimer's, a very personal reading, and I found it to be the most meaningful part of his explication.

I can read this poem in a few different ways. One way you can read it is as an expression of desire for a posthumous union with God after death, waking up into an eternal day. You might also read it as a love poem, a kind of epithalamium for a wedding. I could go through the poem and show how each line supports both of those readings. And that might be helpful to you, especially if you are heaven or marriage-bent.

But what feels most meaningful to me is to read this poem in terms of the eternal now. This is how this poem arrives in me.

It may have an undercurrent of longing in it, a kind of wishful thinking, but it isn’t written in a future tense. It is written with an immediacy of already being in a state of union with Light.

Always Mine!

“Mine” is a possessive word, one which sets off an alarm in my mind. (I once heard “mine” referred to as a “four letter word.” Sometimes I think of the word as a mental landmine, a mindmine.) But if I set my own prejudice aside, something else takes hold, something more child-like, but also very difficult. The poet has achieved something difficult with these words, a feeling of permanent connection. Just reading the two words alone with that emphatic exclamation point gives one a feeling of inclusion in this union.

No more Vacation!

This line takes a minute to process because in order for it to follow from the line before it can’t mean “vacation” the way we usually think of vacation, as a break from work. Vacation here means something closer to a vacating. If something is always yours, then you no longer need to be apart from it. There’s a subtle irony to the word “vacation” here, a kind of vacation from vacations.

There’s also a tremendous relief in the line indicated by that second exclamation point. No more being apart!

Term of Light this Day begun!

That third exclamation point really underscores the poet’s astonishment. If this is a wished for union, the emphasis shows that the poet wishes for it desperately. But again, the poem is very much in the present tense. “This day begun!” As I write this, it is morning. In the morning the day feels full of endless possibility. I read the lines as if I was saying them to myself: “Term of Light this Day begun!” It feels like an ecstatic incantation.

The word “Term” following from the word “vacation” sets us up for the metaphor of “school” that will run through the rest of this poem. We are learning something, along with the poet.

“Term” is an interesting word because it indicates that something will end. (It comes from the latin word for boundary). But we already have a kind of paradox in this poem. If something is “Always,” then how can it have a termination? The crux of this paradox is where I think the power of this poem resides. The next lines will take us even deeper into the dizzying union of the particular with the eternal.

Failless as the fair rotation
Of the Seasons and the Sun.

What a gorgeous set of lines this is. The Term of Light is as failless as the rotation of the seasons (year) or sun (day). In other words, the term of light may end, but it always comes back around again. That’s why it is “Always”.

The poet is waking up to the idea that she will always be waking up, and it begins now, with this morning. “This day begun!”

The word "fair" has a double meaning here too. Fair usually means beautiful in Dickinson's lexicon, but it can also mean "just," and here I think there's a touch of both. Light is balanced with darkness, that's just. But it always comes back around in the morning and that's beautiful.

Old the Grace, but new the Subjects —

"Subjects" has a few meanings here. There is the continued pun with school and the idea of studying new subjects for a new term. But subjects also means selves here (new days, new seasons, new births). Again we remember the resonant term from F935, “harrowing Grace.” The eternal return might not include our subjective self, harrows the self like a farmer harrows wheat, but, if you align yourself with the "Failless" rotation of the sun itself, with Old Grace, then the day is “always” yours. The moment is yours.

Old, indeed, the East,
Yet upon His Purple Programme
Every Dawn, is first.

The first stanza has an interesting trochaic rhythm. If you read it out loud you’ll see how the escalating excitement of the first three exclamatory lines sets up the flow of the next two lines. Also every line ends with a soft “n” sound which gives the sense of the day going on and on.

The rhyme of the second stanza is more clipped. The second stanza is still in a trochaic rhythm, but the second and fourth lines stop short, putting even more emphasis on “East”and “first”. There is a cool pay-off for this in the last line where you get the N sound of ‘dawn,” which was set up in the first stanza, but you also get the new rich rhyme of "first" with its counterpart "East." The old Grace goes on and on, but the subjects are always new, always first. Firstest.

In the poem just before this one on sheet 17 a boy drowns and reaches out in anguish. Meanwhile, over his head is spread water lilies. That’s a similar idea, in a way, to this poem, the eternal return of old grace.

Old, indeed, the East,

This line points to the fact that the sun rises in the east. But the word “East” has a deep set of meanings for Dickinson. In this poem there is, perhaps, an allusion to Eastern philosophy. In Eastern thought (which is older than Western thought,) there is emphasis on the eternal return. Western thought, by contrast, is more about a teleological directive. There is, then, a kind of Eastern ideal in this poem, which can be found in much of Dickinson’s work. In this manner, a poem like this one stands side by side with Dickinson's famous Transcendentalist neighbors Whitman, Emerson, Fuller and Thoreau. 

And yet—every dawn is first.

I think in this line you get a sense of the poem's original impulse. The poet has recovered a child's ability to see the familiar as unprecedented.

That phrase “Purple Programme” is telling. Dickinson imagines the East almost as a headmaster (or, as she would call it, a preceptor) laying out a curriculum. Every morning a new lesson appears on the horizon. And the curriculum never becomes stale and gray because the day's particular presentation is always unique and grand. Purple is a royal color. 

Each morning is the first day of school. Light is the curriculum.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S.

I think of William Blake’s lines,

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the bird as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

The difference is that Dickinson embraces the binding to joy in the use of the word "mine." That difference may seem small, but I think it points toward an important bridge between two opposing points of view. 

How the Waters closed above Him

How the Waters closed above Him
We shall never know —
How He stretched His Anguish to us
That — is covered too —
Spreads the Pond Her Base of Lilies
Bold above the Boy
Whose unclaimed Hat and Jacket
Sum the History —


       -F941, J923, sheet 17


A boy has drowned. All that is left behind is his hat and jacket. That’s the scenario. It’s what Dickinson does with that scenario that leaves us shaking our heads.

How the Waters closed above Him

What might Dickinson mean by this line? She means, first, the literal experience. She is wondering how the boy experienced the loss of air. But the word choices give us more to consider. Waters closing above one is ominous. It’s as if the water itself has agency and is purposely closing over the boy. Even the plural of Water adds to the effect. She could have, and almost anybody else would have, written it singular: Water. But the plural adds to the feeling of being overwhelmed. And it is also notable that this closing is coming from “above.” In this first line Dickinson may be speaking literally about an actual drowning, but she takes us into the metaphoric realm of the psychological and even the spiritual.

We shall never know —

We can’t ever know what the terrible experience of drowning, or dying, feels like for another. We are each  alone in our suffering.

How He stretched His Anguish to us

I’m reminded here of the Covid pandemic. Over 20 million people died world-wide and many of these people were quarantined and alone, separated from family. Each dying person was surely stretching Anguish out as they were struggling for breath. They must’ve felt so utterly alone in their suffering. I can only imagine the crisis of faith in such a circumstance. 

That — is covered too —

This line is saying that the experience of reaching for help in suffering cannot be known by those on shore, as it is covered up. The word “cover” here adds to the ominous suffocating feeling that the poem evinces. There is a pun here too because the poet is “covering,” like a reporter, the experience of panic. So “cover” has at least three layers here; drowning and being “covered” by water; experience being unknown and “covered” over, and the revelation of the unknowability of another’s experience being “covered” by the poet..

Spreads the Pond Her Base of Lilies

This line is so deeply Dickinsonian in its implications.

It appears that the same force that closed the waters above the boy is now spreading lilies above his head. That phrase from F935 comes back to me here, "harrowing Grace.” Out of terror sprouts beauty. This beauty is, on one hand, unfeeling, and certainly no help to the dying boy. Nature goes on being beautiful in the face of terror which is somehow even more terrifying.

On the other hand (the hand of the poet) these lilies are laid out in sympathy. The carefully wrought beauty of this poem is like a pond spreading lilies above the boy. It is an elegy. “Spreads the Pond (Poet) Her Base of Lilies.”

Bold above the Boy

Because the B sound itself is so Bold, we can’t help but notice its preponderance here, Base/Bold/aBove/Boy. It sounds like bubbles coming up from under the water!

The word Bold here is perfect. To be bold can have a positive connotation, as in "to be courageous." Sometimes it can have a negative one though too, as in "to be rude." Both ideas seem to be at play here. Dickinson’s sympathies are with the boy, but her understanding is with the eternal return of nature. The poet seems to be admonishing the Waters though (and maybe herself) for being so bold as to spread beauty in the face of tragedy.

Whose unclaimed Hat and Jacket
Sum the History —

It’s a ghostly image, the hat and jacket left behind. It adds to the uncanny effect of the poem.

There's a symbolic meaning of “hat and jacket” too I think. The things that protect and keep us warm in life go unclaimed in death. Together they “Sum the History.” This is the Sum of what we amounted to in life, the vestments (the attachments) that kept us warm against the impending cold.

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry," wrote Dickinson in a letter. This one is freezing cold. And yet the beautiful lilies boldly remain, for what it's worth, as well as that Hat and Jacket. 

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Monet's Water Lilies

So set it’s Sun in Thee —

So set it’s Sun in Thee —
What Day be dark to me —
What Distance far —
So I the Ships may see —
That touch how seldomly —
Thy Shore?

     — F940, J808, sheet 17, 1865


Adam is on vacation. We are grateful to Tom Clyde for taking up the mantle to write the commentary for F940:

*

Here we have a short poem in six lines, posing a single question.

Yet it contains multitudes.

In one reading of this poem, we stare down into a well of unspoken sadness. The poet seems to be stating that she is fine, FINE I TELL YOU. “What Day be dark to me?”

We suspect, however, that she is full of longing and loneliness, despite her protestations. She
aches for someone who is no longer physically present.

In another reading of the poem, we find ourselves focusing on the power of devotion to transform the world. Love can make dark day light! Love can make that which is far near! Reading the poem in this way teaches us how geographical distance or emotional estrangement might be overcome with the right attitude.

A third way through this poem is to read it with eros in mind. When we listen to it this way we soon discover that it is full of sensual detail, only half-concealed by metaphor, like a dress falling from a shoulder.

These are three possible readings of many.

Somehow, in this single rhetorical question spanning six lines, Dickinson covers a space as large as the globe and as small as the body.

How does she do so much with so few words?

Let’s look more closely, line by line.

*

Dickinson starts us off with a six-syllable fragment. At first we find it hard to get our bearings.

Who is talking to whom?

So set it’s Sun in Thee—

(The apostrophe in “it’s,” by the way, is simply a case of Dickinson’s quirky habit. She writes it
as if it’s a contraction, but in this line it clearly functions as the possessive “its.” So let’s not get hung up on that part.)

We notice first, if we read this first line aloud, how the alliterative “s” sounds in “So” and “set”
and “it’s” and “Sun” are sliding past us as we move forward.

Dickinson launches us into this poem like a vessel sliding into water. Sssss ss sss ss. We only come to rest at the very end of the line, on the soft sand of “Thee.”

So set its Sun in Thee—

Who is talking to whom? Now we know. Importantly, the poet is addressing a “Thee,” not a “You” — that is, she is talking to someone she loves. She is arrested by that person. Has come to rest on that person.

We read on:

So set it's Sun in Thee—
What Day be dark to me—

In line two we find out who the “it” was in line one: it was the “Day.” So the question of the poem begins to emerge…

As long as the sun, which shone on the speaker earlier, now shines on her beloved too, then what day could possibly be dark?

Note that after we rest on the sandy bottom of “Thee” at the end of that first line, the alliteration of the “s” sound now shifts to the alliteration of a “d” sound. From “set it’s Sun” to “Day be dark.”

Also, I don’t know about you, but for me that hard rhyme of “Thee”/“me” helps me hear those “d”s in “Day” and “dark” as little waves, knocking against us.

Yet the underlying logic of these two lines of rhyming six syllables is still, we have to admit, a little obscure.

We understand that the poet, although technically in darkness at her location, does not feel her day is dark on a subjective level. Why? Because she knows that the sun is still setting where someone she loves resides.

But WHY should this mere knowledge lighten her day? After all, she is still not with this other person.

Why should just knowing some atmospheric phenomenon— the rotation of the earth causing a reddening of the horizon at the longitude which marks the location of her beloved — have anything to do with her experience of the sky at her own location?

Is she fooling herself?

Or is she devoted beyond reason?

We might ask out of our own experience: does simply knowing that someone we love is in light… make it light for us? This is an extravagant claim for the power of the imagination.

I mean, let’s think of some examples of how this might work:

● Can we taste M&Ms just because our loved one tastes them?

● Would we feel refreshed just because we happened upon a Facebook Live stream of our loved one swimming?

I would suggest that this is a reach.

Perhaps, though, Dickinson means to imply that, in some inexplicable way, when we love we are the same person as our beloved?

That’s amazing, if true.

*

But how would this transformation, an Ovidian metamorphosis, feel, if this really does occur?

Let’s read on to find out:

What Distance far—

Ok, here in the third line (can you believe we are only at the third line??) we get more on the same theme. And also another “d” word, another little wave against our vessel.

We saw already that time collapses in love. Seeing the sun now makes the fact that I saw it earlier immaterial… because I see it again now with thee.

This third line (“What Distance far—“) makes it clear that, to Dickinson, both time and space are collapsed by love. Distance is no longer “far” at all; you are near to me because you see the same sun.

So far, Dickinson seems to be saying that love makes us… commingled.

Indistinguishable.

Maybe even identical?

Again, is this folly? Wishful thinking? Deep commitment?

We can read it either or both ways.

*

Fourth line:

So I the Ships may see —

Here is where Dickinson begins to explain what sustains her, at last. She sees ships, messengers, passing from her to her beloved. (Maybe actual ships? Or are these “ships” letters, flowers, poems?)

This transit of “ships” is enough to form a kind of connective tissue.

Recall how the poem started with the sound of a ship hitting the water. Sss. Then, with a gentle thud, against the th of “Thee.” Now it seems to be lifting off the sand with this “sh” sound (followed again by the “s” in see as it gains speed).

Next line:

That touch how seldomly—

No matter how infrequently these “ships” — these letters, these missives, these flowers, these poems — reach the one she loves, it is enough. They have transformed time and space and brought her to the only place that matters.

The final line is just two syllables:

Thy Shore?

Isn’t it beautiful, the way that Dickinson connects the metaphor serving as the conclusion of the poem — a fleet of ships sailing “seldomly” but ceaselessly to the beloved — back to the original “Thee” of the first line? “Thee” folds into “Thy.” Not any shore. Thy shore.

And by this addition she deepens it too. Dickinson doesn’t say that ships “seldomly” touch “Thee,” but rather “Thy Shore.” That comforting “sh” sound again, as our ship meets sand.

The poet’s beloved has become a shore, a ground, a grounding. A continual shipping route takes her there in an eternal circle. Time and space are immaterial. We are here.

This ending moves me a lot.

(Aside: My mother, who is 84, currently has dementia. And when she sees me she often says in wonder: “When I am with you, everything makes sense.” She doesn't worry about memories or meals or the schedule for the day. During my visits, she doesn’t worry about a thing. We are together and that is all she needs. It is an incredible honor to be someone’s shore.)

That touch how seldomly—
Thy Shore?

*

Back to the three possible ways through that I mentioned at the beginning.

The first — as a poem containing a deep well of unspoken sadness. Even though Dickinson asserts that these “ships,” following their assigned route from her to her beloved, are enough…she does not quite convince, does she?

The poet is merely seeing these ships disembark. Her role is passive. We can imagine those old black and white film clips of friends and family members frantically waving their handkerchiefs in the air as a passenger ship disembarks. Isn’t the poet alone, even in a crowd, on that metaphorical wharf? We suspect so.

Also, she acknowledges that they “seldomly” touch the shore of the beloved. Has there been a slow-down in shipping? Have there been storms? Accidents at sea? There is the implication of an untold story there — of a loss and falling-off from some better state of affairs.

Finally, when she mentions the “Dark,” we sense that the poet has a visceral sense of that dark. It is not a stranger to her, even while she says she banishes it. Nor is “Distance far” a stranger to her. Read this way, the poem feels harrowing. It seems to invoke the power of the imagination as a plea for relief.

*

As for our second way through — as a tribute to the devotion of a lover — this way emphasizes the poet’s act of will.

Read this way, the entire poem is a defiant question posed in the face of doubt. Oh yeah? She seems to be saying. Watch me.

She will be there at the dock watching those ships depart… her cheeks flushed in the wind, her eyes just as bright as ever, lit by her unfading love for her beloved. We can admire the irrational and metamorphic power of love. Dante’s Beatrice. Marcel’s Albertine.

*

Finally, how about the erotic reading of this poem?

I left this for last because it hit me last. On my tenth or twentieth reading, I suddenly I heard it.

So set it’s Sun in Thee—

The sun is setting in the beloved. Not over. Not on or about. In.

This is an intimate preposition for Dickinson to use. From this first line of the poem we are somewhere very personal, quiet, between the lover and the loved one.

There’s dark. There’s distance. But they are banished.

And then the last three lines of the poem have a hushed tone. They sound almost like a seduction.

So I the Ships may see—
That touch how seldomly—
Thy Shore?

Sh — ss — th — ss — th — sh.

Read these lines aloud to hear their undeniable sensuality, full of soft combinations of consonants.

Next there’s the choice of the verb “touch” in the second to last line. These same ships, which the lover saw off, now touch the beloved.

That touch how seldomly—

The erotic charge of that “seldomly,” which can be read as increasing the anticipation.

But, most of all, the gorgeous two-word ending, “Thy Shore.”

I cannot read this, now, without thinking of the shore as the body, the softness of somebody’s skin. What happens when we touch another and land on his or her shore?

There is a thrill knowing that a letter or a poem reached someone we love, partly because we know that person now holds it in their hands. And the same goes for the recipient, knowing that it began its journey in another’s room, desk, bed. No wonder people used to perfume the pages of the letters they sent.

*

This poem contains multitudes.

Eat your heart out, Walt.

        

        -Tom Clyde

A ship leaving port in 1911, closer to Dickinson's time than to ours

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 is 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.