What I see not, I better see—

What I see not, I better see—
Through Faith—my Hazel Eye
Has periods of shutting—
But, No lid has Memory—

For frequent, all my sense obscured
I equally behold
As someone held a light unto
The Features so beloved—-

And I arise—and in my Dream—
Do Thee distinguished Grace—
Till jealous Daylight interrupt—
And mar thy perfectness—

      -Fr869, J939, 1864

I found this poem to be very difficult to parse. One thing that helped was finally realizing that in the line "No lid has memory," memory is the subject and not the object. It's not saying "closed eyelids have no Memory," but rather "memory has no eyelids to close." In other words, you can shut your eyes to the world out of faith, but you can't shut off your memories.

A prose translation of this poem, then, might go like this:

What I do not see with my eyes, I see more clearly through faith. My hazel eye sometimes closes and loses sight, but memory has no eyelids and never shuts. When my senses are shut off, I can still see just as vividly, as if someone were shining a light directly on the beloved face. And then I rise, and in my dream I bestow upon you a singular grace, entering a moment of complete and mutual presence, until jealous daylight breaks in and interrupts.

Let's go through the poem.

What I see not, I better see—

I think of future-seeing blind Tiresias here. I think of that passage in Frankenstein where the unsightly creature is befriended by the old blind man. Our eyes may deceive us, and so if we shut our eyes we are closer to each other, closer to God.

Through Faith—my Hazel Eye
Has periods of shutting—

I love that Dickinson uses her own eye color here. Dickinson’s poetry is so all-seeing that its easy to forget that there are specific eyes involved. Dickinson’s eyes have been described by her contemporaries as hazel. She described them herself once as as being the color of "sherry in the glass that the guest leaves."

The color hazel comes from the hazel nut. In this sense, it is born of the woods, just as elsewhere Dickinson has described her hair as being the color of the wren. 

Emily's specific hazel eyes, through faith, attempt to shut themselves against the physical specificity of the hierarchical world so they can see the inner world of the heart, and, perhaps, the world beyond.

For frequent, all my sense obscured
I equally behold
As someone held a light unto
The Features so beloved—-

My friend Darin Stevenson once asked me a question that I am still pondering. What generates the light in our dreams? The light held up to the remembered features of a beloved is like that. It’s dream light, and in it the beloved is illuminated.

“Behold” is a powerful word too. What does it mean to “behold” someone's features in our dreams. How can another be held in memory? What is actually being touched?

And I arise—and in my Dream—
Do Thee distinguished Grace—

These lines are intriguing. What does it mean to arise in your dream and do the beloved “distinguished Grace?” If you were dreaming of a lover, what distinguished Grace would you do with Him/Her? And distinguished by/from what? 

It makes my heart beat a little faster these lines, to imagine arising in a dream to do distinguished Grace to a lover.

“Arise” is a word like “behold,” and “thee,” and “Grace,” religious words, here bent back to the lover.

The most enlightening moment here for me is that in the dream the self and God and lover all become conflated. The self is, God-like, bestowing grace.

Till jealous Daylight interrupt—
And mar thy perfectness—

Bestowing grace upon another happens with our eyes shut, in dreams. In daylight though, because of the delusion of our senses, we are separated. There is a profound link here between jealousy (the root of our sins) and the false separation brought about through our senses. There is no jealousy in dreams, only a merging through grace. 

I'm not saying this very clearly, but hopefully I am saying it just well enough to get the gist of the subtle insights of Dickinson's thought across. 

One further thought that is worth keeping in mind I think is that on an immediate level the "Thee" in the poem is the reader, and the distinguished grace being bestowed by Dickinson upon the reader is the poem itself. We are not who she was originally holding in her memory, but through the alchemy of poetry, we are, nonetheless, the recipients of her closed-eye grace.

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff