It dropped so low — in my Regard —

It dropped so low — in my Regard —
I heard it hit the Ground —
And go to pieces on the Stones
At bottom of my Mind —

Yet blamed the Fate that flung it — less
Than I denounced Myself,
For entertaining Plated Wares
Upon My Silver Shelf —


          -FR785, J747, fascicle 37, 1863

Some Dickinson poems function as generic parables. In this one you can plug X in for “It.” X is anything that you once fell for, but has now fallen.

You could try, as many have, to apply the situation to Dickinson’s life. You could plug in for X some friend or lover who has fallen in Emily’s esteem. Or perhaps “publication” could be plugged in here, since there is another poem in this same fascicle which begins “Publication is the auction of the mind of man.”  But really it would all be guesswork. The poem could be applied to any disillusionment

How does it land for you? That is the important question I think.

There was a guy back in HS who I thought was the coolest guy ever. How amazing, I thought back then, that this guy doesn’t care what others think of him. He was the quarterback of the football team, handsome, well-dressed and wealthy. He had a sexy indifference that I deeply envied. But all of that surface show turned out to be like the silver plating over a base metal. Many years later this friend imploded in a spectacular way and the baseness was revealed on the craggy rocks of reality. It turns out, in retrospect, that my social anxieties were less a defect, and more a sign of a desire to connect with others. It was my own self-doubt that turned out to be a foundation for building a Shelf. (My own Shelf is made of recycled wood, but we can't all be Emily Dickinson.) 

The parable of this poem may be compared to another from the bible, the one about not building your house on sand, from Matthew 7. “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”

There is a parallel between the two parables even in that rock the house is built on. In Dickinson’s poem she hears, in her fertile imagination, this once esteemed thing hit the ground “And go to pieces on the Stones/ At bottom of my Mind —”

The bottom of Dickinson’s mind turns out to be as solid as the rocks in Jesus’ parable. But here we have an added element. If the bottom of her mind is like rock, the top is a silver shelf. What a wonderful rhyme with  "myself." She takes the parable to the next level. Make the thing where you keep your valuables the more valuable thing. The invaluable things will fall on their own accord, when... “the rains come down, the streams rise, and the winds blow and beat against that house,” but the silver shelf built in that house upon the solid rock will be inviolate.

For me, the idea of this poem being about publishing, and Dickinson's own poetry, makes some sense. I find the clue for this in that word “entertaining.” Dickinson is not here to entertain us with easy poetry, she’s here for those more rare and durable metals that belong on her shelf.

It’s fascinating to me that, in light of Dickinson’s aversion to publishing, in poems such as this one she seems to be writing for the general public. A parable, by its generic nature, has a public purpose, and yet what was Dickinson’s plan for making these poems available to this general readership? Did she expect that the same fates that threw the plated wares to the ground (according to this poem) would assist in leaving her finely wrought Silver Shelf for future generations? And doesn't it appear as if the fates have done their part? Here we are now, reading the poem, her letter to the word, that is sitting still upon her silver shelf.

-

Notes: 

1. I think it is meaningful that this poem and the one proceeding it in the fascicle both begin with something being dropped. If you read the poems in order, you can hardly help notice this. She drops this word "drop" here as if it were a hint. In the previous one, FR784, Dickinson wants to drop her burden of responsibility for a quick fix, and in this one what drops is something false. There is a progression between these two poems then. The desire for the quick fix in the previous poem is, in this poem, perhaps, the false thing that is dropped. In other words, in the previous poem, she wants to drop the burden, but in this poem Dickinson decides to drop her desire instead. 

2. There's a guy on YouTube that breaks down some Dickinson poems. He can get pretty histrionic when he gets worked up about the poems which I appreciate. There's a moment in his breakdown of this poem where he gets so worked up he throws his head back for a moment and then brings it forward and says  Wawawooey. It's around 7:45 mark in this video. I just thought I'd share this great hidden moment with the greater Prowling Bee community.