Precious to Me — She still shall be —

Precious to Me — She still shall be —
Though She forget the name I bear —
The fashion of the Gown I wear —
The very Color of My Hair —

So like the Meadows — now —
I dared to show a Tress of Theirs
If haply — She might not despise
A Buttercup’s Array —

I know the Whole — obscures the Part —

The fraction — that appeased the Heart

Till Number’s Empery —
Remembered — as the Milliner’s flower
When Summer’s Everlasting Dower —
Confronts the dazzled Bee.


     -F751, J727, Fascicle 36, 1863


This one becomes more beautiful and dazzling every time I read it. I’ll see if I can say why, though when reading a poem over and over there is a cumulative effect that leads to being overturned, and a dream logic that must be experienced rather than explained.

I’m going to put aside the supposition that most commentators bring up about this poem, that it is for Sue. It may well have been, and was probably accompanied by a buttercup, but to reduce the poem to this is to miss the point of the poem. Forget the names, forget the specificities of the life. “She,” after all, is unnamed here. Forget the fashion of the time (as opposed to the never-goes-out-of-fashion style of the buttercups). Forget the color of the hair. But remember the meadow from which this dead “flower” in the hat on top of the head of hair came from. Unlike us, summer is everlasting. And so is poetry.

Precious to Me — She still shall be —
Though She forget the name I bear —
The fashion of the Gown I wear —
The very Color of My Hair —

This opening almost seems like a complaint, a lament. (Dickinson often begins her poems with this sort of ruse. See F748 in this same fascicle for another good example of a poem that begins with a complaint, but which is really anything but.) 

I will love Her long after She has forgotten my name. This very poem is a kind of proof of this long lasting love. It is a poem still loving, 150 years later. In that sense it reminds me of Shakespeare's famous sonnet 18. It is worth noting that Dickinson's poem is also a 16 line sonnet.

To forget the name of a lover, or the color of their hair, would take a long time, so this poem makes an uncanny move from the get go. It puts us in the future, long after fashions have changed, after the body, itself, perhaps, is gone.

So like the Meadows — now —
I dared to show a Tress of Theirs

The poet has become “So like the Meadows — now —” She has turned into a meadow, Now. The everpresent “nowness” of this poem is akin to the ever present buttercups each spring.

Like Whitman come back as the grass, this poet has come back as a meadow full of flowers. (There is another poem with a similar idea, in which Dickinson actually seems to be one-upping Whitman, "Contending with the Grass —/ Near Kinsman to Herself —” See F642.)

If this idea of a buttercup in a meadow is taken metaphorically to be the poem, then we can extend the trope to say that we still have a field full of Dickinson’s poems, a whole meadow's worth.

The fashions may have changed, but the poems stay in style. (In the case of Dickinson, though, we still do remember her name, and her hair color too. I’ve seen locks of her hair. It still holds its lovely auburn hue.)

I like that Dickinson, having become the meadow, “dared to show a tress of theirs.” There is much to be wondered about in that past tense verb “dared” here. She dared to show us a meadow’s tress,

If haply — She (we) might not despise
A Buttercup’s Array —

If we put ourselves in place of the She here, then we are being shown the returning glory of the spring through Dickinson’s poem, as opposed to that which we may have come to despise, the transient, and eventually forgotten, body.

I know the Whole — obscures the Part —

The fraction — that appeased the Heart

Till Number’s Empery —
Remembered — as the Milliner’s flower
When Summer’s Everlasting Dower —
Confronts the dazzled Bee.

This stanza is hard to parse because "Remembered" modifies "fraction" rather than "Empery." I think it goes like this:

I know the whole obscures the part, but the fraction that appeased my heart, until sheer numbers took over, will be remembered, just as the flower placed by the hat maker* remembers the bee even as the dazzled bee is confronted by the gift of an everlasting summer, the recurring meadows full of flowers.

The flower on the hat is the poet, remembering the bee who once loved her, and whom she still loves. It’s wistful, but also, with the gift of the buttercup, and the poem, the sadness has been transformed into “Summer’s Everlasting Dower.”

         -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

a meadow full of buttercups

*There is the possibility that the milliner’s flower is meant to be artificial here. I like the suggestion of the artificial, as a poem has an artificiality about it, but I think the flower must've had real congress with the bee for this image to really work. 

It's also worth noting that the She in this poem is a Bee. The bee is usually the male part in the analogy of flowers and bees, but not here.