These tested Our Horizon—

These tested Our Horizon—
Then disappeared
As Birds before achieving
A Latitude.

Our Retrospection of Them
A fixed Delight,
But our Anticipation
A Dice—a Doubt—


     -F934, J886, sheet 15, 1865


Though Dickinson's poems are full of pain and anxiety, there are many pleasures to be had in them. First there’s the pleasure of the riddle. In this one we are presented with an abstract pronoun, “These," and we have to figure out what it refers to. Who are these “These?” Dickinson's unfixed pronouns open up possibilities. It's ultimately indeterminate. These. 

As so often happens with a Dickinson poem, I don’t get the riddle until I get a clarifying clue in the second stanza: “Our Retrospection of Them/ A fixed Delight” Oh, okay, I see, if our retrospection is a fixed delight, then “these” must either be the dead, or a lost love. Lost love can work for this poem, especially in the idea of having "our Horizon" tested, but the plural "these" leads me to think that it is more likely the dead Dickinson is thinking of here. 

Okay, once we “get” the riddle, we can take pleasure in going back and looking at the poem line by line for the deeper meanings explored therein.

These tested Our Horizon—

The horizon is the furthest we can see, and, since we are talking about the dead, it’s the end of life. The dying “test our horizon” before they disappear. Much could be made of this rich phrase. To test a horizon is to push it, to challenge it. This idea sets up the next lines.

Then disappeared
As Birds before achieving
A Latitude.

Latitude is a measurement for North or South. Is the bird flying north during the summer? Or South to warmer climes? The question underscores the "doubt" that ends the poem, but either way, from our perspective the bird disappears before we can locate it.

So by comparison, the "These" of the first line vanish before fulfilling their purpose. The poem becomes about things that begin to matter but are gone before they become what they might have been.

But latitude also means freedom, as in: "to give someone latitude." That secondary meaning was common in Dickinson’s day. So maybe Dickinson means that the birds disappear before attaining freedom. The birds seem naturally free yet even they vanish before realizing complete liberty. In other words, no life fully reaches unrestricted possibility.

People enter our lives and disappear like birds before achieving a latitude. Death interrupts lives before they seem complete.

Our Retrospection of Them
A fixed Delight,
But our Anticipation
A Dice—a Doubt—

“A fixed Delight” is a chilling phrase. We have this fond memory of a loved one who has departed. But it is “fixed.” It’s set already. And yet, it is still perhaps better than the unknowable future and our doubts about what lies beyond “the horizon” of life. It’s such a Dickinsonian equation. The past is positive, but fixed. The future is not fixed, but is therefore anxious (“Anticipation”) and risky (“Dice”) and possibly disappointing (“Doubt”).

Now it is we, the living, who are left to to test the horizon. Will we “achieve a latitude” before we disappear? No dice.

The pleasures in the poem are in working through the riddle, and then in the cascading revelations that come from grappling with the ideas, and finally, in the poem's music. A poem is a kind of “fixed delight” and this one is particularly delightful, in part because of the interplay of the T and D sound. Read the poem just focusing on those two sounds and you’ll see what I mean. The T and D do a little dance with each other.

And speaking of dancing, Emily used “horizon” for the boundary between earth and heaven in her second Master letter: ‘and you have felt the horizon hav’nt you – and did the sea – never come so close as to make you dance?’

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff