They say that “Time assuages” —

They say that “Time assuages” —
Time never did assuage —
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with Age —

Time is a Test of Trouble —
But not a Remedy —
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady —


     -Fr861, J686, Fascicle 38, 1864

I reached out to one of my favorite poets, Jennifer Moxley, to ask if she would like to contribute to Prowling Bee. The following is the insightful and moving essay Jennifer sent me in reply:

The poem is not making an argument; it is asserting a verity. Against self-care axioms such as “time heals all wounds” and similar dictums we twenty-first centurions have swollen and then sanded into facile measures meant to smooth over the hard bits of life, as if to make it sweet despite daily tweets meted out by the death cult currently in power, Dickinson posits, as is her wont, a wholly contrarian view. With a bossy certainty that brooks no argument, she lets us have it: if your suffering lessens with time, then it wasn’t real in the first place. The juggernaut “they” who say “time assuages” are lying.

Dickinson equates abstract mental “suffering” to concrete bodily “sinews.” Sinews are the stuff that binds muscle to bone, the fibrous connective tissue we call tendons. The most cursory of research proves her simile medically unsound (sinews slacken with age), but no matter. It is poetically pleasing, which is what counts here.

Or perhaps she’s using the word “sinews” in the sense of “strength, energy, force” (OED), which was not an uncommon her time? If such is the case, she would not only be comparing one abstraction to another (suffering to strength) but also making a fascinating argument against senescence. I love the slipperiness of this proposition.

In the second stanza “suffering” is synonymized to “Trouble.”Not like “car trouble,” but more like what Gordan Gano meant by “trouble” when he sang “I’ve got girl trouble up the ass,” or Pound meant in “Cantico del Sole”: a “disturbance of mind or feelings; worry, vexation; affliction; grief; perplexity; distress” (OED). Time will “test” trouble, that is, time will determine whether or not it’s genuine.

Dickinson’s poem assuages my worry that I am ill because I cannot heal from the death of my mother. Recently I awoke in the night with my mother’s body in mine and became all cramped with thoughts of her extreme solitude when facing death. I was three thousand miles away. Her hand was empty of my hand, her ear of my voice. “What is wrong with me,” I thought, “that such a pain can still prick with such freshness.” My mother died thirty-five years ago. “Nothing is wrong with you,” the poem becalms, “your suffering over the death of your mother is genuine.” Time does not turn suffering sweet, but poems can.

“I grieve that grief can teach me nothing,” Emerson wrote after he realized that the death of his precious little son Waldo had left him fundamentally unchanged, “neither better nor worse.” Is his view at odds with Dickinson’s? “[S]ome thing which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me, falls off from me, and leaves no scar,” he continues in his essay “Experience.” Emerson regrets that suffering is not educative, nor does it “carry [us] one step into real Nature.” Which says nothing of whether or not suffering is a genuine malady, only that it cannot be alleviated by any argument about its value as a vehicle of growth. In this reading Emerson is in concert with Dickinson in protesting any pandering to our pain. True suffering cannot be assuaged, nor does it contort or better us through its lessons.

How do I fold the wisdom of these awesome forebears into my long-held conviction that the poet’s visionary birth is precipitated through a painful confrontation with finitude? Orpheus suffers the death of Euridice. Whitman the death of the she-bird at the New Jersey shore. In the wake of these experiences they become true poets. These stories recount metamorphoses, but are they also tales of education? Is the poet better or worse for such experiences? Better not to put a value on awful change, Emerson says, lest it become a formula. Whereas when Dickinson writes, “actual suffering strengthens,” perhaps she means both that with time suffering grows in intensity, but also that it can make us more powerful. At least as poets.   

      —Jennifer Moxley