Love—is that later Thing than Death—

Love—is that later Thing than Death—
More previous—than Life—
Confirms it at its entrance—And
Usurps it—of itself—

Tastes Death—the first—to hand the sting
The Second—to its friend—
Disarms the little interval—
Deposits Him with God—

Then hovers—an inferior Guard—
Lest this Beloved Charge
Need—once in an Eternity—
A smaller than the Large—


      -Fr840, J924, 1864


In poems like this one Dickinson can be a hard nut to crack. But we can try. In the attempt we get much closer to the nut.

It starts off easy enough:

Love—is that later Thing than Death—
More previous—than Life—

Love was here before we were born and will be here after we leave. At a very basic level this is true. I loved my wife and out of that love came children. When I die these same children will still feel love for me.

The next line is easy enough too, and quite beautiful.

Confirms it at its entrance

We feel a natural love for the newborn child. This feeling confirms for us love’s primacy. That is indisputable. The powerful feeling we have automatically for a newborn is an inherent sign of our love. It is confirmed for us at our very entrance onto the planet.

The primacy of this love is not to be underestimated. (Conversely, the absence of Love is anathema to life. Lady Macbeth informs us she knows what it is like to give suck, to feed a newborn, yet still, to feed her ambition she claims that she would dash her baby’s brains against the wall. Ambition is thus revealed by Shakespeare as antithetical to Love.)

The next line though is a bit more difficult to suss:

                             ...And
Usurps it—of itself—

Love usurps Life. In other words, it is more important than Life. This is another quite beautiful thought. Love is there at the entrance, but not only that, it also takes over Life. This is what sacrifice of the soldier, or the mother, means. Life is offered up for Love. Love, which was there from before we began, is something we are willing to die for.

If the poem ended here, I’d already feel a whole world wiser. But it doesn’t. It gets harder:

Tastes Death—the first—to hand the sting
The Second—to its friend—
Disarms the little interval—
Deposits Him with God—

That syntax is hard to parse, but once you do, you begin to see that the difficulty stems from Dickinson's condensed matter. She is doing a lot in a very brief space.

Love, (here, meaning the love of the poet,) offers to be the first to taste death. Love is willing to take the bullet. Love worries. This willingness to die for a beloved lessons the sting of death for the the beloved. It is what hands the sting of the second death, the beloved's, over to the "friend.” The term "friend" here, lower case, is pointing to the friendship between the lover and the beloved. Love relieves the sting of death through friendship, through the willingness of one to take on the burden of another.

In so doing Love disarms the interval. In other words, Death is made easier for the one dying. In a poem preceding this one, Fr 838, Dickinson speaks of easing a loved one's death by holding a glowing candle up for the beloved’s failing eyes. (See post for relevant biographical details.) This is an important theme for Dickinson. This death-watch stands in the poems as a symbol of the kind of Love that is there until the end.

By being there, the loved one deposits the living one with God. Love was there before the beginning, reigned in life, and now is easing the sting of death and gently dropping us off with Providence.

I love how the syntax of the stanza allows that "Second" to be a second of time too. The second we love another before ourselves, the second a dying one can see this in our eyes, the second of that "little interval" just before death," all of this becomes the moment that we are handed to a “friend."

“Disarms” is great word here. For a myriad of reasons the moment of death may feel like being caught up in warfare. Love will take those self-lacerating weapons away from us.

Then hovers—an inferior Guard—
Lest this Beloved Charge
Need—once in an Eternity—
A smaller than the Large—

Love, since it is personal, and therefore only a fraction of the larger source of love, is inferior. We are guardian angels for each other, but are "inferior." "Inferior" implies that there is something even larger, something Superior, looking out for us, something of which we are only a small part. But, this poem promises that the poet will, nevertheless, hover over the body of the beloved she is in charge of, in all her inferiority, just in case. Just in case of what?

Ah, this is where this poem becomes most beautiful. Just in case once in Eternity, which is to say now, which is to say this second, the beloved, you, might need such a love. The smaller love fits our smaller self. The smaller love is the representative of the love of this person and this moment. I’m here for you, now, the "small" poet says to her beloved.

Dickinson has “lesser” in the original MS as an alternative for "smaller." It seems at first to be a better fit, at least alliteratively. Lesser goes beautifully with “lest," "beloved" and "Large.” But I think she chose “smaller” because smaller is not necessarily lesser. It's just smaller. And also, it just sounds…sweeter.

Once again I am awed by the capacity of Emily Dickinson's ability to love.

     -/)dam Wade /)eGraff

The Death of Chatterton/ Henry Wallis/ 1855

P.S.I'm grateful to Susan and The Prowling Bee for giving me the opportunity to go so deep into these poems. If I wasn't "charged" with writing about this poem, then I don't think I could have begun to truly understand it.