While it is alive

While it is alive

Until Death touches it

While it and I lap one Air

Dwell in one Blood

Under one Sacrament

Show me Division can split or pare –

Love is like Life – merely longer

Love is like Death, during the Grave

Love is the Fellow of the Resurrection

Scooping up the Dust and chanting "Live"!

                                                                        F276 (1862)  491

We know the “it” of the first stanza is a great love, for the poet makes that clear in the second stanza. As long as this love is “alive,” there is nothing that can come between the narrator and her beloved. Love laps the same air, shares the same sacrament and even the same blood – it is the warp and woof of the narrator’s existence.

            It is “like Life,” Dickinson writes – except not so subject to death. It will endure (and her poetry ensures that). It is, however, also “like Death” – a line that is not entirely clear to me. Not clear at all, really. I suspect, though, that Dickinson is getting at the notion that Love isn’t just life but also the vast stillness and eternality outside of life. The dead await resurrection within the grave. That timeless disembodied wait must be part of the still heart of Love.

William Blake's Creation of Adam.

            Best in the poem are the last two lines. Dickinson sketches a seeker of higher knowledge, a “Fellow of the Resurrection” – akin to a Fellow of the Royal Acadamy – who with great confidence chants over handfuls of dust as if that might bring them back to life. Love is that Fellow, too, always always “chanting ‘Live’!” As crazy as the Fellow sounds, however, the passage echoes the creation of Adam: God “formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature” (Genesis 2:7). What has happened once, the poet implies, could happen again through Love. It is the ultimate Life Force.