No Other can reduce Our

No Other can reduce Our
Mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it be Nought –
A Period from hence –

But Contemplation for
Cotemporaneous Nought
Our Mutual Fame – that haply
Jehovah – recollect –

No Other can exalt Our
Mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it exist –
A Period from hence –

Invited from Itself
To the Creator’s House –
To tarry an Eternity –
His – shortest Consciousness –

  

    -F738, J981, Fascicle 36, 1863


This poem took awhile to come to terms with. (And perhaps I still haven't.) At first I took “mortal consequence” to mean “death,” as in, the consequence of being mortal is…death.

But eventually I started to think that “mortal consequence” might have more to do with the meaning of our life, the consequence, or importance, of it.

One crux of this poem for me is in the opposing, but complimentary, ideas in the first and third stanza here. In the first stanza you get:

No Other can reduce Our
Mortal Consequence (the importance of our lives)
Like the remembering it be Nought – (nothing)
A Period from hence – (say, 1000 years from now)

That is a dismal thought, but also liberating. Need we worry so much?

Now that we are reduced to NOTHING, the third parallel stanza gives us the flipside:

No Other can exalt Our
Mortal Consequence (the importance of our lives)
Like the remembering it exist –
A Period from hence –

We may be nothing in the long run, but let us remember for now we exist. We exist! Existing is the exalted consequence of existing.

That is the wallop this poem packs for me. The reduction to absolute nothing followed by the exaltation in mere being is a rhetorical move with a singular power.

We’ve looked at the parallel structure of stanzas one and three. Let’s back up and look at that second stanza:

But Contemplation for
Cotemporaneous Nought
Our Mutual Fame – that haply (haply = perhaps)
Jehovah – recollect –

Okay, so we may be nothing, but we must note that we are nothing COTEMPORANEOUSLY. We are nothing together, in time (co-temporanously). This existence together IS our mutual fame. Not only do we exist, but we exist together in time. One can hardly help thinking here of the (ironically) famous Dickinson poem, (F260), “I’m Nobody! Who are you?/ Are you – Nobody – too?/ Then there’s a pair of us!”

Perhaps we are nothing, and there is nothing more to it than that, but perhaps (“haply”) Jehovah will recollect us. (To give it the proper Dickinsonian twist, perhaps we are the remembrance of God?)

This second stanza sets us up nicely for the exaltation of the third and fourth stanza.

No Other can exalt Our
Mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it exist –
A Period from hence –

Invited from Itself
To the Creator’s House –
To tarry an Eternity –
His – shortest Consciousness –

This is, more or less, how I read these two stanzas, as one long sentence:

Nothing else can exalt the importance of our lives like God’s (our) recollection of it, a period from now, when the soul has been invited, from itself, to tarry, in the house of creation, for an eternity, which is, after all, just a short while for God.

There are many other ways to read this poem, and Dickinson will, herself, change its meaning further, a few years after she wrote it down in this fascicle, and present it to Sue. She will remove the last two stanzas, the very part of the poem I like most. I love the parallel structure alive in this earlier version that takes us from nothing to exaltation. Perhaps she had lost some of that exultation in 1865?

For me the poignant paradox of nothing vs. existence, and how it is reflected in the temporal vs. eternal, is at the crux of this poem. And the heart of it would be the deepest realization of the "cotemporaneous Naught."


    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff



notes:

1. My friend Brice Hobbs pointed out to me that Period in this poem is capitalized. That capitalization does strike me as being pointed. Dickinson uses capitalization to the greatest effect. A simple capitalization from her can carry an entire essay of meaning. This is a good example. Dickinson is talking about a period in the future. But she is also talking about THE period in time, so anticipated by so many, which would be Heaven (which is clear in a poem referencing Jehovah) or, merely, the Afterlife.

By capitalizing Period Dickinson may be drawing attention to the indeterminate quality of some "later" period. You don't know how long or short it is.

A period would traditionally have a beginning and an end. It is counterpoised here with "eternal," which is where the poem ends up. Although, remarkably, Eternity, at the end of this poem, is posed as the shortest PERIOD of God's consciousness. The irony in Dickinson is on another level.

There is also, perhaps, a play on the syntactical "period." This poem possesses no syntactical periods. In fact it uses the much less determinate dash to signal a break between lines. You might even say it doesn't have sentences. You can see a nod toward the infinite in the dash. It has an ongoingness a period just doesn't have. It is also less determinate in meaning. In fact, in this very poem, you see some quite slippery dash usage. Look at the dash in the poem after the word "exist." If you put a period there, you get a very different meaning to the poem. The following line becomes a variable line, which can point forward or backward into the poem.

Dickinson is, in both her form and content, unperioded. She is unsentenced. Unstoppable.

2. Brice also pointed out that the word "hence" could mean both future and consequence. I hadn't caught the "consequence" idea of hence, but it is a beautifully complexifying wrinkle. It deepens the argument when you see that "hence" in this poem even RHYMES with 'consequence," twice. A consequence is a conclusion. A period is also a conclusion. Therefore, we have a connection between Period and hence. Hence also means, therefore, "period." Hence also means "therefore." Period.

3. A note on the word "haply." Haply means "perhaps." The question of the existence of God and an afterlife is elicited by this word. This is a line of thought you can trace through all of Dickinson's poetry. I find her ever deepening questioning of "Eternity" to be endlessly entertaining and edifying. It may seem, upon first reading, that it is only if there is an afterlife ("haply") that we are exalted in God’s eternal memory. But I think there is a sense in this poem, nonetheless, that our mere existence, co-temporaneously, together in time, has an eternal divine quality outside of time, one that doesn't need an afterlife, or any sense of God as Other. Perhaps that is why she later took out those last two stanzas.

4. This is the first poem of the 36th fascicle. It is a powerhouse opener. I'm becoming more and more convinced that these fascicles were arranged with forethought by Dickinson. It makes sense, seeing that she arranged everything in her life very carefully, from her Herbarium when she was 9, to her affairs when she was 33.

 

I many times thought Peace had come

I many times thought Peace had come
When Peace was far away —
As Wrecked Men — deem they sight the Land —
At Centre of the Sea —

And struggle slacker — but to prove
As hopelessly as I —
How many the fictitious Shores —
Before the Harbor be —



     -F737, J739, Fascicle 35, 1863



When you are in dire straits there is nothing worse than a false hope. One false hope is bad enough, but how are you supposed to deal with one after another after another? The metaphor in this poem is apt. When you are struggling to keep your head above water, and have been disappointed by yet another false sighting of land, how do you keep from giving up and just going under?

I sat with this poem for a couple weeks as I was traveling. When I saw people struggling, (which you see everywhere if you are really looking,) I was reminded of it. It seemed to speak for these people. A poem like this is effective, in part, because it makes us feel less alone in our own struggles. Here is a woman who has been there, who understands what it is like to have one hope after another dashed. We bond through our pain, and here Dickinson gives us a poem much less complicated than her usual fare. The simplicity of it is important. It aids in the catharsis. It helps us relate.

But there is another way it is effective. It encourages us not to give up. There is the barest glint of hope in this poem. You see it in that surprising turn of phrase, “struggle slacker.” When a sailor thinks he sees land, he brightens with hope and therefore his struggle slackens. This is a mistake. The poem seems to be pushing us toward making every last effort, reminding us not to be misled by false hopes, not to slacken our struggle.

And then there is that word “fictitious,” which reminds us that the fictions we tell ourselves, the constant promises of romance we are confronted with daily, will only lead us away from the true goal.

This is the last poem of Fascicle 35. Fascicle 35 differed, it seems to me, from the fascicles that preceded it in its intent. While I don’t question the sincerity of the poems in this fascicle, they feel less insular. They seem to be made more with a general reader in mind. This poem is a good example. It says to the astute reader, "Don’t be a sucker like I was. Fight against the false promises of fiction." I don’t know what to do with the fact that Dickinson wasn’t actually sending these out to a general audience for publication. Perhaps she had faith they would eventually make it into the right hands. If so, then her faith has been rewarded. It's remarkable to think that we might well be the real harbor Dickinson was struggling so hard to reach. Poetry's victory over fiction!


-/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S. Franklin prints the original version of the last line, ‘Or any Harbor be.’ Johnson prints her marginal variant, ‘Before the Harbor be.’ There is a pretty dramatic difference between the two. The variant carries hope in it, since it implies a real harbor, whereas the original does not, as it continues the idea of the harbor being, like the shores, fictitious. Normally I stick with the original, and present the variant, but here I let my optimistic side take over, romantic sucker that I am. Of course, if you want to go the cynical route, you could read it as "How many the fictitious Shores — Before the Harbor be (fictitious also) —" That's really dark, which I also appreciate. But the point is that you can read it both ways, so with the variant there is more -possibility.

P.P.S. David Preest tells us that Dickinson “had occasion to use line 4 herself in the year after this poem, because in September 1864, towards the end of a miserable summer spent in Boston with her cousins having eye treatment, she begins a letter (L294) to Sue with ‘At Centre of the Sea’ as a kind of heading to the letter before saying, ‘It would be best to see you _ it would be good to see the Grass, and hear the Wind blow the wide way in the Orchard.’"