From Us She wandered now a Year,

From Us She wandered now a Year,
Her tarrying, unknown,
If Wilderness prevent her feet
Or that Ethereal Zone

No eye hath seen and lived
We ignorant must be—
We only know what time of Year
We took the Mystery.


     -Fr794, J890, sheet 60, early 1864


In the Franklin ordering of the poems we have now left the fascicles and moved on to some poems that were written on separate sheets of paper and were believed by Franklin to have been written in early 1864. I would've preferred to have moved onto the next fascicle as I believe Dickinson put her "keeper" poems into fascicles, which she arranged with a certain sense of order. But as this blog has, from the beginning, followed the Franklin ordering of the poems, with the project of attempting to include them all, we will tackle several before we get onto the next fascicle.

This one feels slighter than usual, but presuming that all of Dickinson's poems were written with purpose in mind, let's do our best to get a sense of what she is doing here.

Here we have a woman who "From Us...wandered" a year ago. I presume this means that she died. But it's possible that this woman merely disappeared and wandered off. It says we don't know whether the "Wilderness" prevented her feet from going forward, or it was an "Ethereal Zone."

This poem centers around the idea that no one knows what comes after death. It is a mystery. "We only know what time of Year." Maybe that's all this poem is doing, just stating that no one knows. This is, in itself, bold in a time when the majority of people professed faith in an afterlife.

What is the difference, then, between death as a Wilderness or death as an Ethereal Zone?

Both the Wilderness and an Ethereal Zone give us a sense of the unknown, though one is earthly, and one is of the ether, beyond the earth. Ethereal, according to the Dickinson Lexicon, means: Unearthly; supernatural; mystical; mysterious; unexplainable; immortal; beyond death.

So the question here seems to rest on whether when we die we simply return to the earth or transcend to some unknown zone beyond.

I think either possibility, earth or ether, is made more beautiful by Dickinson's word choices of Wilderness and Ethereal Zone.

The last line of this poem "We took the Mystery" is a pretty remarkable way of looking at death. When someone dies all we can do is take the Mystery.

The poem is a striking example of Keats' idea of Negative Capability, which he defines as "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”


      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich, 1808

Biographical note: "Thomas Johnson suggests that the dead woman may be Lamira Norcross, the young wife of Emily’s mother’s youngest brother. If so, the ‘us’ of the poem may include Emily’s cousins, Louise and Frances Norcross, nieces of Lamira Norcross." -David Preest