This Merit hath the worst—

This Merit hath the worst—
It cannot be again—
When Fate hath taunted last
And thrown Her furthest Stone—

The Maimed may pause, and breathe,
And glance securely round—
The Deer attracts no further
Than it resists—the Hound—

    -Fr844, J979, Sheet 4, 1864

The first line of this poem inverts of the usual order of words. (The fancy Greek term for this is anastrophe.) Dickinson does this trick often and it takes some getting used to when trying to understand her poetry. She  almost always deploys an anastrophe to enrich the meaning of the poem. Let's look at that line:

This Merit hath the worst—

At first “Merit” seems to be the subject and “worst,” the object. When taking this line by itself, it would mean something like: There is merit in dealing with the worst possible circumstance.  In 1862 Dickinson wrote to T.W. Higginson that she had had a great terror that she could tell to no one. That same year she wrote 366 poems, whereas the year before, 1861, she wrote about 80. The uptick in production seems to be tied to the “terror.” So the terror of Emily Dickinson’s "worst" at least had the Merit of being grist for great poetry.

But once you read the next line of the poem, you realize that the first line has to be inverted; “the worst” is the subject and “This Merit” is the object. The line is saying, instead, that the worst has this Merit: it can’t happen again. That little twist of grammar, balanced so it can read both ways, is a signature move of Dickinson.* She loved to start a poem on a hinge and let the meaning swing in a couple directions. The worst has its “merit," and the merit of the worst is that it can't happen again.

When Fate hath taunted last
And thrown Her furthest Stone—

The Maimed may pause, and breathe,
And glance securely round—

When fate has thrown its furthest stone, or, dealt its worst blow, then the maimed may finally breathe and feel secure again. This is painful to read, especially once you have glimpsed the probable circumstances behind this poem. Once fate (read: overpowering predator) has done its worst, what more can it do? The worst is over. It can never be that bad again. Cold comfort. There is relief, at least,  in having gone through the worst.

The circumstances that I refer to here, to be blunt, is rape. I'm loathe to bring the subject up, as it is horrible to contemplate, but I feel that it must be reckoned with. There are two reasons why I believe this poem refers to sexual assault. The first one is because this poem was written on the same sheet of paper as Fr841, a poem which I find it hard not to read as an account of rape. You can go back and read the comments on that poem for a full exploration. Suffice to say here that the poem at hand carries two words over from that poem, “stone” and “maimed.” Their proximity in space (both being written on the same sheet), shared word choice and subject matter are all enough to link the two together in my mind. 

The second reason can be seen in the final two lines of this poem,

The Deer attracts no further
Than it resists—the Hound—

The Deer and the Hound is a classic predator/prey metaphor. In a hunting context, the deer is chased until it collapses. In a human context, this maps onto sexual predation. The victim is pursued, the predator relentless.

This line tells us that the deer only attracts the hound as much as it resists. This suggests that the predator is stimulated precisely by resistance. Once the prey stops resisting, the pursuit ends. This is disturbingly close to the dynamics of sexual assault where the act itself is bound with power.

The poem, then, can be read as a trauma narrative in miniature. The worst arrives. It maims. But its merit, if that word can even stand, is that once endured, it cannot recur. The survivor breathes again, altered but alive. And in the grim arithmetic of violence, resistance draws pursuit, while collapse offers the only release.

Dickinson’s genius here is to lay all of this on the line, while at the same time refusing to let the poem settle. She could well be speaking of the general catastrophes of fate; death, illness, etc. Yet the language makes room for another kind of fate which is less speakable, the experience of predation, of being hunted and subdued. 

The poem’s double valence (existential fate and predation) allows her to speak across taboo boundaries while still preserving deniability. It also allows readers to fit the poem to whatever "worst" that fate has dealt them.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

The Wounded Deer, by Frida Kahlo. 

In the lower left corner is written the word "Carma," 

which may be translated as "Fate."

* Dickinson loved to start with a phrase that tips both ways, so the reader can’t quite decide where the emphasis belongs. A few examples:

“Much Madness is divinest Sense — / To a discerning Eye —”

This can mean, "Madness, when rightly perceived, is actually the highest form of sense," but it can also mean, "What most call sense is itself madness." So “madness” is only “madness” to shallow eyes. Both readings coexist, so the paradox is baked into the syntax.

“Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.”

This can mean, "Success is most deeply valued by those who never win it," or "Only the unsuccessful know what success truly is." Is “sweetest” about intensity of desire or clarity of knowledge? She leaves it unresolved.