Unfulfilled to Observation—

Unfulfilled to Observation—
Incomplete—to Eye—
But to Faith—a Revolution
In Locality—

Unto Us—the Suns extinguish—
To our Opposite—
New Horizons—they embellish—
Fronting Us—with Night.


    -Fr839, J972, Fascicle 40, 1864


Here we have arrived at the final poem of the final fascicle of the 40 left us by the poet Emily Dickinson. (As the fascicles have been arranged by Christanne Miller in "Poems As She Preserved Them.")  Sometimes Dickinson's fascicle arrangements feel composed, and they probably were considering how artfully everything was arranged by Dickinson, from her poems to her herbarium to her cakes and wine-jellies. But this poem, lovely and meaningful as it is, does not necessarily feel like a conclusion to a fascicle, let alone 40 of them. But maybe it does if we think of it as a kind of summation of the boiled-down message of Dickinson's oeuvre: light carries darkness and darkness bears light.

I sometimes find myself trying to reverse-engineer an Emily Dickinson poem. I’ve noticed that Dickinson often starts with an idea and then, to use an apt word from this poem, "embellishes" it. She dresses it up in beautiful sounds, to make it stick, and then the meanings accrue in every line.

This one starts with the idea of the relative interdependence of dark and light. If we are standing on the dark side, then we can be assured of a relative light side. It all depends on where you are standing. It’s an intriguing idea, and, ultimately, an uplifting one. It’s true realization takes us beyond dualism and into a sense of a dynamic whole.

This is an understanding worth preserving in poetry, just like Lao Tzu’s similar yin and yang wisdom was preserved for us in the Tao De Ching 2500 years ago.

Likewise Dickinson is taking her philosophical gold and spinning it into poetry. For whom did she do this? Whom did she ultimately have in mind when writing her poetry? I doubt she was writing it just for herself, though maybe. If you were prone to depression, then a poem like this, channeled from your higher self, would be an awfully good reminder.

I can see a poem like this written for a friend or a cousin too, but it does feel a little bit “impersonal." It feels general, and therefore I mostly see it as something written for an ideal future reader. Poems are often written for that reason. The poems that Emily Dickinson loved to read, like those of Robert and Emily Browning, came to her via impersonal means as well, through books sold in bookstores. Poems like the one at hand convince me that Dickinson was thinking of future readers, of me and you, in the abstract, when she wrote them.

This might seem like an obvious reason for any poet to write poems, except for with Emily Dickinson it begs a question. If these were meant to be read by a general audience, why didn’t she try to have them published? There are several possible answers to that question, and people have long conjectured about it,  but suffice to say that Dickinson did make the gesture, at least, to sew 839 of them up into 40 little booklets. (Mabel Loomis Todd is the one who labeled them “fascicles). She left these booklets to the surprise of everybody, even the sisters who outlived her. And she left them for fate to do with as it would. I believe though that Dickinson trusted that the inherent worth of the poems would make sure they were delivered to their destinations. She also probably had some trust that she would get some post-mortem help from Lavinia and Sue, as well as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Helent Hunt Jackson and other well-published friends. I doubt Austin would’ve done much with them, if he were the sole responsible executor, but his wife Sue and daughter Martha and mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, all went a long way to help get the poems out there. Austin needed the women to do the important work. One thinks here of Vincent Van Gogh's brother Theo's wife being the prime mover in preserving and publicizing Vincent's worth after his death.

To be fair though, Higginson and Samuel Bowles, both men with a feminist agenda and a large broadband, went a long way to help Dickinson too. She covered herself well, in retrospect, like any great secret will that is meant eventually to spill. You might say that through these indirect means Dickinson pro-engineered the poems so that they might, with help from providence, be in front of us now 175 years later.

Okay, back to the reverse-engineering. So Dickinson had a strong and salutary idea and looked for a form for which it might fit. This particular one necessitated two stanzas. The first stanza lays out the argument and the second stanza illustrates the argument with a metaphor.

Next Dickinson chose a meter for these stanzas. She sticks to her usual 4/3 common-hymn stanzas, but she gives it a little change-up by making the rhythm trochaic instead of the more usual iambic. I believe she chose this meter because it makes the poem punchier. It starts on the down beat, like funk music. (I imagine the poem starting out with James Brown’s emphatic “UHHNN!!!”) It’s more sing-songy this way, and therefore more memorable.

Unfulfilled to Observation—
Incomplete—to Eye—

First she states the issue. “Look, you can’t see your own complete fulfillment.” We are being told by an objective poetic narrator that they can see what we cannot. This is every great seer’s claim, from Homer’s Tiresias on down. You can’t see it with your two eyes, but if you listen to the blind poets, they will sing it to you.

Dickinson’s first two lines start off with open-vowelled cretics. A cretic, sometimes called an amphimacer, is a word that is stressed/unstressed/stressed. Both words, "Unfulfilled" and "Incomplete" are oxymoronic as well. They both speak of negations of positives. You can hear this emotionally in the very sounds of the words. The open-vowel sound serves as an orally visceral undoing of the positive words that follow, un/fulfill and in/complete.

The open-vowelled cretics also serve to give the poem a nice ring.

We thus have a strong doubly-emphasized point: there is a fulfillment, but one which you can’t observe from your blind side, a completeness that you can’t see in the dark.

This sets us up for the big “but.”

But to Faith—a Revolution
In Locality—

In other words, if you have faith in that which you cannot see, then you will know that the world has merely revolved and now you are on the dark side. Logically that would mean that the light is being blocked by something, namely, the revolving sphere of the earth. If you are in the western hemisphere, it is dark, but you have Faith, since you have seen it happen before, that the earth is ever-revolving and the sun is now shining on the other side.

The word Faith here takes us from the idea of a physical sunrise we have seen with our own eyes toward a hidden metaphysics. The word “Revolution” does the same thing. This poem is, on one level, talking about the way your local earthly location has revolved from day to night. But it also hints toward an inner revolution in seeing.

Dickinson wrote several poems about “locality." (See the notes below this post for a few examples.) As Prowling Bee reader and commentator Tom Clyde has written, “The poems have given me so much comfort in these difficult times. Truly Emily Dickinson’s sense of locality is a solace to me.”

Okay, we’ve had the argument, and now, in stanza two, we can embellish with some metaphors to help us better understand:

Unto Us—the Suns extinguish—
To our Opposite—
New Horizons—they embellish—
Fronting Us—with Night.

In returning our focus on the construction of the poem, we see that Dickinson chose to start this stanza with an open vowel again to echo the first stanza. The first line is tied to the second through an open-vowel trochee, and likewise the first stanza is tied to the second. She stitched the poem together this way.

That word “Unto” is one of my favorite Dickinson words. She always wields it beautifully.

Unto Us—the Suns extinguish—

This line, before the next line completes the syntax, has its own stand-alone power. 

The suns extinguish “unto” us. Reading and digesting this line in isolation, which for a moment we do, it’s as if the suns were extinguishing into us, which is an evocative image. I picture suns disappearing straight into our chests. “Unto” is originally a mash-up word of "until" and "toward." So the suns are extinguishing "until toward" us. 

Unto Us—the Suns extinguish— 

To our Opposite—

The way that “unto” works here, then, goes in two opposite directions at once. The Suns extinguish/ to our opposite, but that light is all coming unto you as darkness, as an extinguishing. The energy of the line goes away and towards the self at the same time, and the light is, through word magic, made synonymous with the darkness.

The word “Opposite” here is telling. “Our Opposite.” What does it mean when an opposite is “ours?”

Add to this the gorgeous music in this line in the sounds of "un", "us" and "sun."

You might also be able to hear an echo of “Son” here too. Christ, the Son of God, extinguishes “unto us,” dies for us, for our opposite and darkened selves. This is another idea that Dickinson thought a lot about, so it wouldn’t surprise me if she was hinting toward this idea here, which helps account for the word “Faith” set up in the first stanza.

Finally we have our second illustration:

New Horizons—they embellish
Fronting Us—with Night.

The sun, extinguishing here, is now, therefore, over there and embellishing “New Horizons.” While we are confronted with night, the side we paradoxically can't see is filling with light.

New Horizons can mean a lot of different things, depending on how you hear it. It can literally mean the sun’s horizon is brightening up a new day on the other side of the world as we sleep. But poetically it can mean that as our eyes are darkening for our personal long winter's night sleep of death, the light is rising in heaven (or “Immortality” as Dickinson preferred to call it). Or it could mean that even as you die, a New Horizon, a new generation is being born into the world. It could simply mean to remember that when you are having a bad day things revolve and better days come. It could mean that when you take on someone’s load, their darkness, it lightens the burden of another. We know, from looking at big-picture nature, says the poem, that any darkness, which is to say any difficulty, promises an unseen blessing.

So don’t despair, for the other side is surely there. And, as this poem insinuates, the darkness and despair is our sign of surety that the other side exists. And there is a further implication too: our darkness enables the light. In another poem Dickinson calls it the “white sustenance/ despair.”

       -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Sunrise by the Ocean/ Vladamir Kush

Notes: 

1. A poem preceding this one in Fascicle 40, Fr837, also uses the sun and moon as metaphors, even though  the idea of the poem is very different. 

2. Other uses of "locality" in Dickinson poems:

“A nearness to Tremendousness…” 

In this poem, Dickinson uses the word "Location" and the coined term "Illocality"—a play on "locality," suggesting a paradoxical state of being both place-bound and unplaceable. “In Acres—Its Location / Is Illocality—” This juxtaposes the domestic ("Acres") with an abstract, boundless sense of place ("Illocality"), highlighting her tendency to destabilize fixed locales. 

“The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea—…” includes the line: “…Forgets her own locality—” Suggesting something dissolving or transcending its sense of rooted place. 

“Unfulfilled to Observation…” Contains: “…In Locality—” and conveys a sense of existential or perceptual transformation tied to a sense of place.