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 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 getting at:

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. (She couldn't possibly have foreseen just how far her service would extend.) It would follow then that this poem itself is meant to be of service. The question is, how?

Let's circle back to that question. Suffice to say, she was serious about it, severe. 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 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. You can write it in prose for one thing. Poetry is work meant for the ears of others. The take-away here, though, is that the 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 decides to do to be of service. This is what she feels she has left in the wake of her loss. It is her "single spade" (to borrow the image from 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. A poem like this one extends beyond aphorism though. It is more cri de coeur. 

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 I get what it 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 when Nature is gone? Who, or what, is running the self? Who is writing the poem? What's the causal relationship in "When she (Nature) had put away Her Work/ My own had just begin"? Does the loss of Nature enable and fuel the work of the poet? 

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

(See what just happened to me there? Dickinson's idea of Nature putting away its work is so charged it got my wheels spinning. Suddenly I’m thinking about questions that get down to core beliefs. She's wily like that.) 

Let's move on:

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

Note the lack of the normal dash in that line. 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 the 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 keep its hue, but 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 an absolute midnight of the soul. Here in this midnight darkness there is, 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—

It's slightly difficult to follow the syntax here, but I think it goes something like this, "No drug for (putting us out of) 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 Being itself seem like the blame here, as if it were an inherently deadly disease which no drug could cure. But wait. 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 the poem's worth to the reader. I think there is worth in an honest reckoning of despair. It is oddly reassuring to us. She feels us, at our lowest, and because she is so naked and blunt in her own hopelessness, we feel sympathy with her. This poem brings us into sympathy. There is something useful in that. It's severe, but it's of service. 

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

 

P.S. The final stanza reiterates the message of drugs being of no use that we saw in Fr886, the poem immediately preceding this one in fascicle 39:

I tried...
In Cups of artificial Drowse
To steep its shape away —

P.P.S. I happened to be listening to the Rolling Stones' song "Dear Doctor" as I wrote this. The lyrics echoed this poem neatly. The jar is the poem:

"Oh help me, please doctor, I'm damaged
There's a pain where there once was a heart
It's sleepin', it's a beatin'
Can't ya please tear it out, and preserve it
Right there in that jar?"