Ample make this Bed—

Ample make this Bed—
Make this Bed with Awe—
In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.

Be its Mattress straight—
Be its Pillow round—
Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise
Interrupt this Ground—


     -Fr804, J829, early 1864


Dickinson gave a rare title to an early version of this poem, “Country Burial.” You can imagine why she removed this title though, and it is an object lesson in the problem with titles in the first place. They can over-determine a reading. If this poem is only about a burial, it is far less powerful. By removing the title, the bed in this poem becomes suggestive of a marriage bed. You may also read "bed" as a place of birth, too, like, for instance, a garden bed, where seeds gestate below the surface and no sun can “interrupt.” Minus the title, the bed takes on the fullness of life; birth, marriage and death.

The result is that the poem becomes very resonant. The poem itself, just like the bed, is "ample," and like the pillow, is “round." The poem is making its own bed. The folding in of birth, marriage and death in the metaphor of the bed all seems to be happening under the surface of the “yellow noise,” residing in the netherspaces of the subconscious.

You can see what I mean if you look at the scene of Kevin Kline reading this poem to Meryl Streep in the film Sophie’s Choice. Here the poem is used for romantic purposes, and it rings with aura. This wouldn’t have worked if the title, "A Country Burial" had stuck.

 
Though even if the poem did carry the title, and functioned as mere elegy, it would still be powerful. Dickinson presents death not with fear, but with tranquility and a hint of hope. Death is imbued with amplitude and awe, with the promise of excellence and fairness, and finally, is presented as a place where you can rest uninterrupted.

But as a love poem, I think this poem is even more powerful. It speaks to the moment, right now, through the incantatory spell of this poem; let us make our bed ample and full of awe. And let’s close the curtains so we can sleep in.

Ample make this Bed—
Make this Bed with Awe—

Already, in the opening sound of the first word of this poem, there is a feeling of ampleness. Aaaaample. (Whitman also uses this word to excellent effect in “A Farm Picture,” which begins, “THROUGH the ample open door of the peaceful country barn”) Not only does the poem start with that open vowel feel, but it’s also in trochaic meter, instead of the more usual iambic, which means it begins with an emphasized syllable. In other words, this openness is emphasized. There’s a big difference between “Make this bed ample” and “Ample make this bed.”

The repetition of “make” in the second line is part of what gives this poem its incantatory power. And "make" is an interesting imperative too. Is it a command? A suggestion? A plea? A prayer? All of it. And then finally you get to that “Awe” which also carries the open vowel sense of amplitude and falls on an emphatic beat. Because the line ends on the half beat there is an extra ringing out of the sound of that "awe." These are subtle effects, but they really do make a difference in the feeling of the words, which carry the meaning of the poem.

In it wait till Judgment break
Excellent and Fair.

The word “break” is doing some heavy lifting here. Judgment breaks excellent and fair? You can take that a few ways. You can see a dozen different ways that Dickinson uses the word break in the Dickinson lexicon, and more than a few of them work for this poem. One meaning of break is change, or conversion. Judgment will bring a changeover into excellence and fairness. That’s the first and most obvious reading of break here, but that word “break” is hard to read without thinking of something being disrupted, and in that sense the "excellence and fair" are implied to be broken by judgment. Fair has a double meaning here too. In the first reading it means “just,” referring to Judgment, but in the second it carries, I think, its more archaic meaning of “beauty." So is the Judgment excellent and fair, or is it interrupting the excellent and fair? 

The main feeling I get is that Judgment will eventually break the ampleness and peace of the marriage/death bed, which, though perhaps is as it should be ("excellent and fair") is still, like the “yellow noise,” a disruption nonetheless.

Be its Mattress straight—
Be its Pillow round—

The incantatory sense of trochaic repetition continues in these lines. "Make this...make this...Be its...Be its.." Spells are cast in trochees. Think of the witches in Macbeth. This poem puts a spell on you.

I’m taken with just how much Dickinson is able to suggest with the dialectic between straight and round here. The straight can be read as a symbol of the masculine, associated with rigid structure, logic and the law (Judgment) while the round has a more feminine quality, connected to comfort, softness, the womb, the moon, the inner world. This brings in a sense of sacred balance to the grave-bed (or marriage-bed.)

“Straight” implies linearity, time that moves forward, from life to death to judgment. “Round” implies eternity. The bed, then, becomes a space where linear time and cyclical time meet, where the body dies, but something else (soul? memory? love?) may continue or return.

A straight mattress could symbolize the formality of death, the thing we can't escape. A round pillow suggests comfort, perhaps an openness to what comes after death, or in the case of the marriage bed, to love and trust.

By pairing just two shapes, “straight” and “round”, Dickinson encodes a whole universe of opposites: life/death, male/female, body/soul, finite/infinite, law/grace.

Let no Sunrise’ yellow noise

Interrupt this Ground— 

“Yellow noise” combines the visual and auditory, creating a kind of synesthesia, where color sounds, and sound glows.

The phrase “yellow noise” is unnatural because we expect “yellow light,” not “yellow noise.” That jolt forces attention and opens the image to multiple meanings. It turns the sunrise from something life-giving into something invasive, almost violent in its disruption. Usually sunrise symbolizes hope and resurrection, but Dickinson flips that. The line dramatizes a desire to protect stillness from the clamor of life.

“Sunrise’ yellow noise" is an entire world intruding; morning, light, sound, time, life. Dickinson takes something ordinary, like sunrise, and makes it strange and unsettling, but in so doing, she defends the quiet, the hidden, the profound, even against something as radiant as morning.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Notes:

1. In his blog, Frank Hudson gets underneath the Aubade quality of this poem, which is helpful. Frank writes, "An aubade is a poem where two lovers wish for the morning to never arrive. Since it is, in fact, arriving, they will deny it, wishing for their night together to remain forever. By using this traditional poetic trope, Dickinson has thrown a rich ambiguity into her 34 words. Although Christian religious belief has its variations, the traditional judgement day is the day of eternal salvation and the universe’s perfection. “Ample make this Bed” compares the morning of divine perfection to the morning that separates the lovers in an aubade. Is this a statement that the sensuousness of human love can be judged greater than eternal salvation? Or is it a puritan statement that any such love will face its final end and judgement? Could it even be both, balanced on a knife’s edge?"

2. A further breakdown of trochaic structure of this poem here.