Snow beneath whose chilly softness

Snow beneath whose chilly softness
Some that never lay
Make their first Repose this Winter
I admonish Thee

Blanket Wealthier the Neighbor
We so new bestow
Than thine acclimated Creature
Wilt Thou, Austere Snow?


     -F921, J942, sheet 12, 1865


As I read this moving poem over and over again it begins to seep into my bones. It's hard to express why it is so moving. The over-all impression is something beyond what any explication can convey. It is freezing and warm, sweet and sad, chilly and soft, all at once.

I remember having a conversation about art with the great poet and critic John Yau once years ago in Berkeley when I was a graduate student. We were talking about what makes art great. I told him that for me it came down in the end to "aura." A painting either had it or didn't. He asked me to explain what I meant. I told him I didn't think it was possible to explain "aura," it just is. He said, "You have to try." 

I’ll start with the newest impression:

A powerful gnome-witch is giving a stern talk to Old Man Snow. She’s admonishing Him, gently advising Him to please give extra blanket to a loved one that was buried in the late autumn. 

The neighbors, the family, (“We”) have given as a gift ("bestowed") this neighbor to the ground, to her new bed in her new neighborhood, and she will soon be tucked “beneath” the blanket of Snow’s “chilly softness.”

At first the poet is shaking her finger at the Snow, admonishing Him, but in the second stanza the stern tone has softened and become a plea. “Wilt Thou,” She asks, “please blanket with Snow his new new neighbor we have lovingly presented to you, and give a wealthier (larger) portion of the blanket to her? After all, the long-dead have become acclimated to the cold underground by now and they don’t need the insulation of the snow as much as our friend does. They're used to it, but I’m afraid our friend is going to be very cold, so won’t you please take some of the snow-blanket from the shoulders of the old cemetery residents and give a little extra to Her?”

But, alas, the Poet knows how "austere" Old Man Winter is, how chillingly severe and strict, knows Winter does not play favorites. But it doesn’t really matter because the Poet does, and therefore she is asking anyway, pleading with unyielding Winter to bend its rules and be merciful for the sake of the beloved.

***

Of course the poet knows down deep it is no use pleading for the dead. The body underground is a corpse, decaying flesh. (Perhaps there is a soul, perhaps not, but if so it can't remain there with the rotting vegetable matter for eternity anyway). The Poet knows this but nevertheless she is alive and grieving and can’t yet let go. 

She knows in her heart though that it’s really "We" that are feeling so chilly. The plea is, in the end, for ourselves. She is asking for the snow to cover us up and keep us warm. The plea is also a way of expressing her love. 

It’s a plea with the highest degree of poetic irony. I find myself wincing at the cold reality that this poem hints at, but am moved by the warm heart of it, and delighted, too, by its "wealthier" imagination. It is at turns comforting, cute, tragic, funny, fantastical, realistic, terrifying, angry, endearing, all the things.

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Notes:

1. I would guess that this poem was written by Dickinson expressly upon the occasion of a late autumn death of a neighbor.

2. The line about "the neighbor we so new bestow" reminds me of the Whitman line, “I bequeath myself to the dirt." What a beautiful conception of death. 

3. The idea of grieving for yourself when grieving for the dead is beautifully expressed in a poem written some 15 years after this one by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and All. 

4. Dickinson's conception of the world of the dead is such that before she died she left instructions that the six Irish men that had long worked for the Dickinsons would carry her casket, and that "they circled her flower garden, walked through the great barn that stood behind the house, and took a grassy path across house lots and fields of buttercups to West Cemetery [500 yards from Homestead]." It's as if she was giving herself, from the casket, one last look at the beloved flower garden, and at the same time allowing herself to be honored by the flowers therein. How very Emily Dickinson. Thanks to Larry B for this wonderful bit of biography. See the note for F847. 

5. Dickinson provides “Russian” as an alternative word for “Austere” in the final line. ‘Wilt Though, Russian Snow?” The difference between the two is worth considering. "Russian" evokes the deepest, harshest northern winter, and it also hints at foreignness. The newly dead have entered an unfamiliar country. Snow becomes a strange realm, almost another nation. I suspect Dickinson went with "austere" as her first choice because the idea of winter being severe and unyielding is important to the logic of the poem. 

6. I imagined a gnome-witch pleading with Snow here because at various times in her letters Dickinson describes herself as both. It seems fitting for this poem to think of them being hyphened together.