If Blame be my side—forfeit Me—

If Blame be my side—forfeit Me—
But doom me not to forfeit Thee—
To forfeit Thee? The very name
Is sentence from Belief—and House—

         -Fr874, J775, Fascicle 39


First question: who is "Thee"? David Preest reads it as Christ, and says, "The word ‘Belief’ in line 4 suggests that Emily is pleading with Jesus." But I'm not so sure. Forfeit me, this poem says, but don't doom me forfeit you. This begs the question, does Christ forfeit us, or doom us to forfeit Him? In Christian theology, as I understand it, the answer would be no. God doesn't forfeit us. Rather we forfeit God. We make the choice.

Dickinson seemed to find so much of the divine in the earthly, and vice versa, that one can never be sure who she is talking about when she uses words like "Belief" and "Thee" and "House." But I think it makes more sense to see this poem as written to a beloved, and one close at hand too, one in the realm of "the house." It's fine if you blame me and don't love me, this poem says, but don't make me give you up by keeping yourself away from me. 

This all points to Susan Gilbert for me. She wasn't living in the house, but rather a hundred yards away in a house within sight of Emily's window. She lived there as the wife of Emily's brother Austin. For those of you who don't know, Emily had a very intimate relationship with Susan Gilbert before Austin did, one which went on, in some form or other, until Emily's death.

The Evergreens as seen from Emily's house.

Dickinson wrote in a letter to a family friend, “They say that ‘home is where the heart is.’ I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.”

The key for me though is in another poem written 13 years after this one, where that word "forfeit" pops up again. 

To own a Susan of my own
Is of itself a Bliss—
Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,
Continue me in this!

What is a reader to make of this poem? I guess for me it points toward the idea that you can love someone without needing them to love you back. Is that desperate self-denial, or is it transcendence of the ego? I'm not sure, but I read it as the latter and here's why. An ego needs reassurance, but Dickinson isn't asking for the other to love her back here. All she asks is to be able to love. 

I believe that the poems that Dickinson kept for herself and transcribed into a fascicle were meant for future readers, and I think Dickinson was too smart, in her poems at least, to champion dysfunctional relationships. Therefore I don't think she is telling us that it is okay to be pathetically clingy in a one-sided relationship, but rather is saying: don't shut yourself off from the divine to spite yourself. She is saying to Sue, essentially, that she doesn't need anything from her, except her presence. That is an example worth following. 

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S. The perfect rhyme of the first couplet, "Me" and "Thee" is disrupted by the complete lack of rhyme in the second, "name" and "House," as if the "Me" and the "Thee" completely fell off the rails...