The Heaven vests for Each

The Heaven vests for Each
In that small Deity
It craved the grace to worship
Some bashful Summer’s Day –

Half shrinking from the Glory
It importuned to see
Till these faint Tabernacles drop
In full Eternity –

How imminent the Venture –
As One should sue a Star –
For His mean sake to leave the Row
And entertain Despair –

A Clemency so common –
We almost cease to fear –
Enabling the minutest –
And furthest – to adore –

    -F717, J694, fascicle 35, 1863


This is a poem about the sun. The word sun does not appear in this poem, so you can classify it among Dickinson's riddle poems. (Though nearly all of Dickinson’s poems function like riddles. That’s one of the reasons they are so addictive. Trying to figure them out is a bit like doing a crossword puzzle, if the answers pointed toward your own soul.) 

Let's start with a literal take on this poem. 

Heaven gives (vests) us each the thing we desire. It's a small Deity. Its brightness makes us bashful on a summer day. We shrink from its intensity, during the day, even though we asked for (importuned) it, on a winter night. And meanwhile, as we are shrinking back, the very thing we craved begins to drop away as the sun begins to set. And yet, though it goes away and we are left in darkness, the next sunrise is imminent. During the darkness of the night we are in despair, and from that place of desperation we have the temerity to ask the sun to leave its place among the stars in the sky and come down to relieve little (mean) us. And of course, it does, every day. The sun rises again in the morning. This mercy ("Clemency," which also means good weather) is actually so common, coming as it does every day, that we almost stop fearing it will go away for good. This good fortune allows us to see even the smallest things far away and to adore them.

Let's look at the symbolic possibilities of this poem. The Sun functions as a kind of double metaphor here. First it is a metaphor for the Deity, but note that this is a "smaller Deity," so the second level metaphor is that of the Beloved (though there might be other possibilities here too). This conflation of religious and romantic love adds a couple layers of complexity. It's very common in Dickinson’s poems, but if you aren't familiar with it, it can be difficult to follow. This idea of a smaller deity, a heaven of a smaller size, fit just for one, is prevalent in the fascicles that precede this one. The idea in this poem is that the sun is a small star, one fashioned for each of us, a glimpse of Heaven. But the second idea here is that the small deity is the beloved, whomever that may be. It helps to keep all three readings in mind as we read this poem; literal, figurative and transfigurative.

I think a good candidate for the beloved in this poem is Sue Dickinson, Emily's sister-in-law. I’m basing this off of two clues. The first is that the poem employs the word “sue,” which, owing to the fact that Dickinson deeply loved Sue (and was probably in love with her too) is probably more than just a coincidence. Secondly, Sue lived with Emily’s brother in the next house door. Emily would’ve likely seen her nearly every day. At night it might have felt like Despair to be without her. But in the daytime there she would be again, just like the sun. This is all conjecture, and it's fun to speculate, but I think it is worth pointing out the word “Each” in this poem. “The Heaven vests for Each/ in that small Deity.” Dickinson could easily have written, “The Heaven vests for ME,” instead of "Each." Furthermore “Each” is capitalized. These poems, though they may not have had many, or even any, readers besides Dickinson in her own lifetime, were still written, somehow, for the benefit of “Each” of us, like road maps, or like “the Light House Spark” for “Some Sailor rowing in the Dark” (F322). The miracle is that they survived at all to reach us Each.

You might surmise that Dickinson turned her lovers into suns and moons and bees and flowers in her poems in order to disguise their identity, and there is probably some truth in that, as there were some good reasons to keep her affairs secret, but I think the more paramount reason is so that anybody might be able to make them their own. The Sun, or small Deity, or Beloved, in this poem, has its shining significance in our own lives, even if it just refers to the literal sun itself.


-/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Sunset by Albert Bierstadt

Notes


* That “it” in the third line gives us a little inkling of the trouble of parsing Dickinson. Does that “it” refer back to “each” or to “The Heaven”? It would make the most sense grammatically to connect it to The Heaven, since that is the subject of the sentence. But it would be strange for Heaven to crave the grace to worship, so it makes the most logical sense to connect “It” back to “Each.” This becomes more apparent in the second stanza as “it” (each) is shrinking from the Sun. There are many such decisions as this to be made in trying to come to terms with a Dickinson poem. It's exciting. When you are limning a poem, you are climbing a decision tree which consists of hundreds of interpretive decisions based on logic and intuition. In Dickinson, they are all important, down to the tiniest detail. It’s part of what makes her so uncannily good. One miscalculation can throw the poem’s intent far off course. The trick is to stay open minded, as there is always a detail that can derail your entire premise. 

* To crave the grace to worship is an ironic phrase. Grace is meant to be something freely given, something we don’t deserve. In the poem preceding this one in fascicle 35 we find out that the pearl only comes when we have stopped craving the pearl. Grace would seem to be something like this. However, in this poem, the thing we so brazenly asks for comes every day, if only we had the patience to wait through the night.

*I think the tabernacles dropping away in full eternity means that the place where the deity (sun) resides (the tabernacle) is dropping away in “full eternity.” The Sun is setting. (Or metaphorically the beloved is dying, or going away). I love the idea that the sun is dropping in “full eternity.” Just using the adjective "full" to qualify eternity gives one pause. If we look at this poem as a description of a literal Summer’s Day, I’m imagining that those tabernacles that are dropping to be large tabernacle-shaped clouds lit up by the sunset. This is the second "sunset" poem we have seen so far in this fascicle.