Severer Service of myself

Severer Service of myself
I—hastened to demand
To fill the awful Vacuum
Your life had left behind—

I worried Nature with my Wheels
When Hers had ceased to run—
When she had put away Her Work
My own had just begun.

I strove to weary Brain and Bone—
To harass to fatigue
The glittering Retinue of nerves—
Vitality to clog

To some dull comfort Those obtain
Who put a Head away
They knew the Hair to—
And forget the color of the Day—

Affliction would not be appeased—
The Darkness braced as firm
As all my stratagem had been
The Midnight to confirm—

No Drug for Consciousness—can be—
Alternative to die
Is Nature's only Pharmacy
For Being's Malady—


    -Fr887, J786, fascicle 39, 1864
 
I saw a musical last night at my daughter’s school called PROM. One of the side characters had a mother who was a control freak. The daughter, tired of feeling controlled, says to her mother, “making your life perfect isn’t going to bring Dad back.”

That’s what I imagine the first stanza of this poem is about,

Severer Service of myself
I—hastened to demand
To fill the awful Vacuum
Your life had left behind—

When I stop to realize that writing poetry is the “severer service” that a poet would demand of herself, I’m reminded, once again, that these poems are meant to be a service. Dickinson was writing these poems as a service to the reader. (I don’t think she could’ve possibly foreseen just how far her service would go. She's touched millions.) It would follow then, that this poem itself is meant to be of service. The question is, how?

But suffice to say, she was serious about it, severe even. This helps explain why she was so prolific during the early 1860s. The general thought is that the uptick in poems during this time was a kind of therapy for the poet, a way of expressing and working through a painful trauma she experienced in 1862. And that must be true, no doubt, but there are less exacting ways to do that. Poetry is work. But the thing is that processing of pain and work are one in the same. It's all "One Art."(See Elizabeth Bishop's masterpiece "One Art" for another beautiful example of this axiom at work.)

Taking the wisdom gleaned from her process and wrapping it up in beautifully-constructed aphoristic poems is what Emily Dickinson can do to be of service, and this is all that she has left in the wake of her loss. It is her "single spade" to hearken back to the poem before this one in the fascicle. The deeper she reaches into the recesses of her own mind and heart, the deeper she reaches into ours, revealing us to ourselves through her hyper-specific lens.

The next stanza, which stays in the same vein, gets a little more esoteric.

I worried Nature with my Wheels
When Hers had ceased to run—
When she had put away Her Work
My own had just begun.

The idea of "worrying nature" is abstract, but we get what she means. But the idea of Nature’s wheels no longer running leaves me perplexed. Nature’s wheels are always running, right? So what does Dickinson mean by Nature here? It says Nature had put away its work. Okay, well we know someone (a lover?) has left the poet bereft, in an "awful vacuum." So is it the poet’s own Nature that has stopped Work? And if so, then what happens? Who, or what, is running the self? Who is writing the poem? And what's the causal relationship in "When she had put away Her Work/ My own had just begin"? Does the death of Nature fuel the work of the poet? 

(The question this begs for me is whether or not the art feeds the pain or the pain feeds the art?)

See what happened there? Dickinson's idea, Nature putting away its work, got my wheels spinning. Suddenly I’m thinking about questions that get down to core beliefs.

I strove to weary Brain and Bone—
To harass to fatigue
The glittering Retinue of nerves—
Vitality to clog

This stanza lets us know that her desire to serve is not just out of a kind desire to serve, but also out of the need to wear herself out, so she can disappear more quickly. She’s killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. 

This poem, and the one before it in Fascicle 39, are among Dickinson’s darkest. There is little to no hope in them.  

It would even seem this poem was written to exacerbate the dark, “to harass to fatigue/ to clog.”

Note the lack of the normal dash in the second line of that stanza:

To harass to fatigue 

Sometimes Dickinson puts a dash where you would least suspect it. This time though she doesn’t put one where you would most expect it. In this case the lack of a dash shows us that the poet isn’t giving herself pause. She’s trying to over-work herself to quiet the “glittering retinue of nerves.” What a phrase that is. We know that these nerves are feeling great pain, but that adjective “glittering” gives us a sense of a kind of shining brilliance that comes from this pain. That brilliance can be seen in the very line itself.

To some dull comfort Those obtain
Who put a Head away
They knew the Hair to—

The “head” the poet puts away is her both her lover's and her own. She doesn’t want to think anymore. The startling and heartbreaking part is that the head the poet is putting away is attached to the “hair" that "They knew." Suddenly the abstraction of “head” becomes very concrete with that “hair.” 

A lock of Emily's hair

That hair is the once living symbol of the physical intimacy between the poet and the beloved.

And forget the color of the Day—

Since the lover has gone away, the dead hair may carry the same hue, but, ironically, the color has drained from the poet’s day. Not just gone, but she’s forgotten it.

Affliction would not be appeased—
The Darkness braced as firm
As all my stratagem had been
The Midnight to confirm—

There is no appeasement here. This line starkly says it, "affliction would not be appeased." The darkness is so firm and secure that every stratagem, every cure, every piece of friendly advice followed, every avenue tried, only confirms that it is absolute midnight of the soul. Here in this midnight darkness there are, presumably, not even the light of moon and stars. The thing that confirms the hopeless state is the fact that every strategy has been tried. 

No Drug for Consciousness—can be—
Alternative to die
Is Nature's only Pharmacy
For Being's Malady—

This stanza reiterates a declaration in Fr886, the poem immediately preceding this one in fascicle 39:

I tried to...

In Cups of artificial Drowse
To steep its shape away —

It's slightly difficult to follow the syntax here, but I think it goes something like this, "No drug for (bringing us back into) consciousness can be (an) alternative to die (because to die) is nature's only pharmacy for Being's Malady." 

That idea is intense because it makes both Being and Consciousness seem like the blame here, as if they were inherently a painful malady which, therefore, no drug could cure. But elsewhere Dickinson writes of Being as ecstasy, and in fact she has done so in this very fascicle (Fr874). The reason why Being and Consciousness are absolute hell, now, in this moment of expression, is because of grief. When you are in great psychic pain the whole world is colored by it, or, as the case may be here, discolored. If it is bad enough, only death can take the pain away.

These last two poems in the fascicle are painful. If you love Dickinson, then you hate seeing her at rock bottom, and, even, perhaps, suicidal. 

This brings us back to the question of worth, I think there is something an honest reckoning of despair that is oddly reassuring to us. She feels us, at our lowest. And because she is so naked and blunt in her hopelessness, we feel a sympathy. This poem shows us sympathy by bringing us into sympathy with it. There is something useful in that. It's severe, but it's of service. 

     -/)dam Wade l)eGraff