Robbed by Death—but that was easy—

Robbed by Death—but that was easy—
To the failing Eye
I could hold the latest Glowing—
Robbed by Liberty

For Her Jugular Defences—
This, too, I endured—
Hint of Glory—it afforded—
For the Brave Beloved—

Fraud of Distance—Fraud of Danger,
Fraud of Death—to bear—
It is Bounty—to Suspense's
Vague Calamity—

Staking our entire Possession
On a Hair's result—
Then—seesawing—coolly—on it—
Trying if it split—

    Fr838, J971, Fascicle 40, 1864

Reading Emily Dickinson is delectable. Every line gives you something tasty to chew on and mull over. The music of the words is like seasoning. And then, often, when the full poem hits you, it is devastating. It makes you feel sick. You may want to vomit up all that poesy. And yet that is something we need too, to purge. We need to be made uncomfortable in order to open up. That's what good literature does for us, at its best. It engages our minds, and finally, our hearts.

Robbed by Death—but that was easy—

The first line of this poem is a doozy. I think it makes more sense if you think of Robbed by Death as “Robbed OF Death.” She is saying that death robbed her by not taking her. In other words, she would prefer not to be alive. But we also find out in that first line that staying alive, even if it is harder than dying, was still easy...

To the failing Eye

Here is an excellent example of the slipperiness of Dickinson’s use of dashes. If you take the first two lines together, then the failing eye could mean the failing eye of the one who was robbed, or it could mean the failing eye of the one who is reading this poem. Add to this ambiguity the fact that the word “fail” is not a pejorative in Dickinson’s lexicon. In another poem, for instance, the poet “fails” for beauty.

Okay, but then after you read the third line you realize, after having already processed the first two lines together, that the dash at the end of line one better functions as a full stop. So now we have a different unit:

To the failing Eye

I could hold the latest Glowing—

So we regather the sense of a full sentence. "I was robbed of death, but that was easy, because I could hold up the latest glowing to the failing eyes of others: I could be a light to those who are dying."

We had to work a bit for that reading, but it's such a beautiful idea that it was worth working for, and it is, somehow, worth more because of having to work for it. It sticks deeper.

There's so much in the idea of holding the latest “Glowing.” Literally, it would mean that you are holding a candle to help the failing eye to see. But a held "Glowing" could be glowing eyes too, or the glowing warm flame of a soul, or even a poem. Dickinson would rather be dead than have to deal with the pain of living, but if she is going to have to live, she is going to hold the latest glowing up to the dying eyes of her beloved. You realize as you read this poem that for the reader, which is now you, this poem IS the latest Glowing and you are the (hopefully) brave beloved. Look at the poem on the screen. Doesn't it appear to glow?

This is a promising opening. We want to see the full light of the candle, the glowing apotheosis of the poem. So we read on.

Robbed by Liberty

For Her Jugular Defences—
This, too, I endured—
Hint of Glory—it afforded—

Robbed by liberty. How does liberty rob? How does freedom limit? Think about how quickly a teenager who runs away from home learns that lesson. Liberty goes for the jugular! 

For Dickinson liberty had its own special meaning. In Matty Dickinson’s charming memoir of Dickinson, Face to Face, she tells of how her Aunt Emily once mimed turning the lock on her bedroom door and said to her: “It’s just a turn— and freedom, Matty!”

Part of Dickinson’s "Glory" as a poet is that she maintained her inverse freedom. She endured it. The Glory, the direct result of Dickinson’s pursuit of liberty, are these poems, which have indeed held, still Glowing, for our own failing eyes.

For the Brave Beloved—

This next line, again because of the dashes, is also difficult to parse syntactically. Does it finish a thought or begin a new one? These kinds of lines are what I call a sliding modifier, and Dickinson uses them often. Either way you read the line, as a prefix or suffix, it informs the poem. Here it all points to one source. It’s all for the sake of the Brave Beloved.

The poet is being brave in this poem, and she is being brave for the sake of a brave beloved.  But brave is wishful thinking here. After all, the beloved proves in the latter half of this poem to be indecisive. Dickinson is saying if you would only be brave, then I would respond by giving you my entire possession. 

Fraud of Distance—Fraud of Danger,
Fraud of Death—to bear—

For the brave beloved I can bear Distance, Danger and, again, for emphasis, Death. All of it I will, and can, endure, spurred on by your love.

It is Bounty—to Suspense's
Vague Calamity—

All of that difficulty of danger and death is “Bounty” compared to being in suspense.  Difficulty in love is Bounty because at least you will grow from your efforts and sacrifices. I presume Dickinson is speaking of the suspense of whether or not the beloved will return her love, or even can return it.

To know is to respond decisively. But if the initial act is a maybe, is "Vague," then that’s true Calamity because then the love is in limbo. We are in stasis. There is no growth, no Life.

Staking our entire Possession
On a Hair's result—

If we are in love, then we are ready to give all of ourselves, our “entire Possession” to our beloved. But what if the beloved is indecisive, and could go either way? Just a hair's breadth, the smallest detail, could change the whole deal. It’s unfair that for one party the stakes should be complete surrender, while for the other the result is neither here nor there, fifty-fifty, iffy.

But then Dickinson makes an imaginative leap and now the hair's difference between yes or no is one the beloved is swinging on, as if glibly testing it. 

Then—seesawing—coolly—on it—
Trying if it split—

The thought of the beloved seesawing “coolly” on her decision, back and forth, is coolly devastating, and we can see just what is so painful about this suspense for the author. The poet is a “soul at white heat,” but the beloved is cool, indifferent. And not only that, but almost seems to be wanting the hair to split, by swinging so carelessly on the decision. If the hair breaks though, it is the poet, not the beloved, who drops into oblivion.

Dickinson has written about the agony of suspense before, most notably in Fr755, which makes a similar claim, "Suspense is-hostiler-than-death." Here, she makes the word suspense come to life by imagining the beloved suspended in the air, holding onto a hair between her decision of yes or no.

Does this metaphor of hair work? On one hand it means little separates the decision between yes or no, but on the other hand the scantiness of the thin strand is what makes the weight of the love so precarious.

Also, hair is such a personal physical connection to the beloved.  

The last word of the poem, the violent "split," is confusing at first. We think of the phrase splitting hairs here, in the sense of a vertical splitting of a hair, as in making small and unnecessary decisions, and maybe Dickinson was playing with that idea as well, how we argue our points until we are lost, but here she is talking about the hair splitting horizontally, as if the future is in the balance, and just holding on by a thread.

In the first 5/8ths of this poem we are privy to Dickinson’s brave love, as one who would take on any threat to her life, happily, for the beloved, and then, in the last 3/8ths of the poem, there is a turn-around, and Dickinson shows us what it means when all of that devotion and bravery is undermined by an indecisive partner.

I would be willing to die for you, and you can’t even bother to let me know if that’s good enough for you?

It's not just good enough, Emily, it's the latest Glowing.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S. All the online reproductions of this poem I could find online have the word “stalking” instead of “staking.” I assume one bad transcription of the poem has led to all of those others. I was sure “stalking” must be wrong and so I looked it up in Christanne Miller’s “Poems as She Preserved Them,” and sure enough, the correct word is “staking." Hopefully this blog will serve as a corrective.