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

When you read the first line in isolation, you think about the possible merit of "the worst." Is there merit in dealing with the worst? 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 line is saying something darker. 

This Merit hath the worst—
It cannot be again—

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 possible circumstances behind this poem. Once fate (overpowering force) has done its worst, what more can it do? The worst is over. It can never be that bad again. Cold comfort. 

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 may refer to sexual assault. The first one is because this poem was written on the same sheets of paper as Fr841, a poem which I find it difficult not to read as an account of rape. You can go back and read the comments on that poem for a further explication. Suffice to say here that the poem at hand carries three words over from that poem, "furthest," “stone” and “maimed.” The two poems' shared word choice and subject matter are 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 easily 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. 

I should say that I'm not convinced that Dickinson did undergo sexual assault, and it still seems unthinkable. But I also see now that it is plausible, and if so, she has much to say to others that have been through a similar ordeal. 

If it is true, then the poem’s double valence (existential fate and predation) allows her to speak across taboo boundaries while still preserving deniability, and, at the same time, it also gives readers room to interpret the poem to fit their own circumstances. 

      -/)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."