Never for Society

Never for Society
He shall seek in vain—
Who His own acquaintance
Cultivate—Of Men

Wiser Men may weary—
But the Man within
Never knew Satiety—
Better entertain

Than could Border Ballad—
Or Biscayan Hymn—
Neither introduction
Need You—unto Him—


      -FR783, J746, Fascicle 37, 1863


The syntax on this one is a little tricky, but once unraveled it is pretty straightforward. Here's a prose translation for the lines below, as I understand them.

Never for Society
He shall seek in vain—

One (who is wise) shall never vainly seek for the society of others.

Who His own acquaintance
Cultivate—Of Men
Wiser Men may weary—
But the Man within

Never knew Satiety—

If you are wise and cultivate an acquaintance with the One in yourself, then you may grow weary of others, but the One within to whom you acquaint yourself, you will never become satiated with his/her company.

Better entertain
Than could Border Ballad—
Or Biscayan Hymn—

The One inside that you become friends with will entertain you better than any Scottish border ballad or Biscayan (Basque) hymn.

Neither introduction
Need You—unto Him—

Unlike the people in society, you need no introduction to this Friend inside of you.

 
Of course, understanding this poem syntactically and understanding this poem internally are two different things.

It’s hard to know for sure who this “Man” inside is meant to be. It could possibly be Christ, with that capital M “Man” and capital H “His.” It could also be read as higher/deeper Self, with that adjectival indicator “own” in the line “He shall never seek in vain/ Who His own acquaintance/ Cultivate.” 

This poem goes some way toward explaining Emily Dickinson’s increasingly reclusive nature. She was vastly entertained by her own ballads, and by her own hymn-like poems. Even the most compelling external distractions cannot rival the richness of self-discovery.

This is a model for the reader. A majority of the poems written before this one in Dickinson’s oeuvre exhibit a painful yearning for a Beloved. In this one the Beloved has been internalized as Self.

It is instructive to pair this poem with a very similar one from earlier in this fascicle, FR773, which begins, "Conscious am I in my Chamber –/Of a shapeless friend –"

Compare, for instance, these lines from the earlier poem,

Weariness of Him, were quainter
Than Monotony
Knew a Particle – of Space’s
Vast Society –

To the lines from this one,

Of Men
Wiser Men may weary—
But the Man within

Never knew Satiety—

Read together you get a a growing sense of this "shapeless Friend" within. In this poem you get the added idea that this Friend is...entertaining! To find this entertaining Self within is a challenge worth taking up. 

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Write your own Border Ballads and Biscayan Hymns!