Always Mine!

Always Mine!
No more Vacation!
Term of Light this Day begun!
Failless as the fair rotation
Of the Seasons and the Sun.

Old the Grace, but new the Subjects —
Old, indeed, the East,
Yet upon His Purple Programme
Every Dawn, is first.


     -F942, J839, sheet 17, 1865


There are often several ways to read an Emily Dickinson poem, and sometimes those ways of reading are contradictory. If our goal is to understand the poem, do we try to exhaust the possibilities in the poem and then leave it up to the reader to take it from there? Or do we choose a reading that is meaningful to us? (“Write about what you know”). Do we skew academic or personal? While I understand the dangers of misinterpretations in subjective readings, I’m still inclined to lean in that direction. In a recent post, for instance, Tom Clyde described how a poem resonated with him concerning his mother’s Alzheimer's, a very personal reading, and I found it to be the most meaningful part of his explication.

I can read this poem in a few different ways. One way you can read it is as an expression of desire for a posthumous union with God after death, waking up into an eternal day. You might also read it as a love poem, a kind of epithalamium for a wedding. I could go through the poem and show how each line supports both of those readings. And that might be helpful to you, especially if you are heaven or marriage-bent.

But what feels most meaningful to me is to read this poem in terms of the eternal now. This is how this poem arrives in me.

It may have an undercurrent of longing in it, a kind of wishful thinking, but it isn’t written in a future tense. It is written with an immediacy of already being in a state of union with Light.

Always Mine!

“Mine” is a possessive word, one which sets off an alarm in my mind. (I once heard “mine” referred to as a “four letter word.” Sometimes I think of the word as a mental landmine, a mindmine.) But if I set my own prejudice aside, something else takes hold, something more child-like, but also very difficult. The poet has achieved something difficult with these words, a feeling of permanent connection. Just reading the two words alone with that emphatic exclamation point gives one a feeling of inclusion in this union.

No more Vacation!

This line takes a minute to process because in order for it to follow from the line before it can’t mean “vacation” the way we usually think of vacation, as a break from work. Vacation here means something closer to a vacating. If something is always yours, then you no longer need to be apart from it. There’s a subtle irony to the word “vacation” here, a kind of vacation from vacations.

There’s also a tremendous relief in the line indicated by that second exclamation point. No more being apart!

Term of Light this Day begun!

That third exclamation point really underscores the poet’s astonishment. If this is a wished for union, the emphasis shows that the poet wishes for it desperately. But again, the poem is very much in the present tense. “This day begun!” As I write this, it is morning. In the morning the day feels full of endless possibility. I read the lines as if I was saying them to myself: “Term of Light this Day begun!” It feels like an ecstatic incantation.

The word “Term” following from the word “vacation” sets us up for the metaphor of “school” that will run through the rest of this poem. We are learning something, along with the poet.

“Term” is an interesting word because it indicates that something will end. (It comes from the latin word for boundary). But we already have a kind of paradox in this poem. If something is “Always,” then how can it have a termination? The crux of this paradox is where I think the power of this poem resides. The next lines will take us even deeper into the dizzying union of the particular with the eternal.

Failless as the fair rotation
Of the Seasons and the Sun.

What a gorgeous set of lines this is. The Term of Light is as failless as the rotation of the seasons (year) or sun (day). In other words, the term of light may end, but it always comes back around again. That’s why it is “Always”.

The poet is waking up to the idea that she will always be waking up, and it begins now, with this morning. “This day begun!”

The word "fair" has a double meaning here too. Fair usually means beautiful in Dickinson's lexicon, but it can also mean "just," and here I think there's a touch of both. Light is balanced with darkness, that's just. But it always comes back around in the morning and that's beautiful.

Old the Grace, but new the Subjects —

"Subjects" has a few meanings here. There is the continued pun with school and the idea of studying new subjects for a new term. But subjects also means selves here (new days, new seasons, new births). Again we remember the resonant term from F935, “harrowing Grace.” The eternal return might not include our subjective self, harrows the self like a farmer harrows wheat, but, if you align yourself with the "Failless" rotation of the sun itself, with Old Grace, then the day is “always” yours. The moment is yours.

Old, indeed, the East,
Yet upon His Purple Programme
Every Dawn, is first.

The first stanza has an interesting trochaic rhythm. If you read it out loud you’ll see how the escalating excitement of the first three exclamatory lines sets up the flow of the next two lines. Also every line ends with a soft “n” sound which gives the sense of the day going on and on.

The rhyme of the second stanza is more clipped. The second stanza is still in a trochaic rhythm, but the second and fourth lines stop short, putting even more emphasis on “East”and “first”. There is a cool pay-off for this in the last line where you get the N sound of ‘dawn,” which was set up in the first stanza, but you also get the new rich rhyme of "first" with its counterpart "East." The old Grace goes on and on, but the subjects are always new, always first. Firstest.

In the poem just before this one on sheet 17 a boy drowns and reaches out in anguish. Meanwhile, over his head is spread water lilies. That’s a similar idea, in a way, to this poem, the eternal return of old grace.

Old, indeed, the East,

This line points to the fact that the sun rises in the east. But the word “East” has a deep set of meanings for Dickinson. In this poem there is, perhaps, an allusion to Eastern philosophy. In Eastern thought (which is older than Western thought,) there is emphasis on the eternal return. Western thought, by contrast, is more about a teleological directive. There is, then, a kind of Eastern ideal in this poem, which can be found in much of Dickinson’s work. In this manner, a poem like this one stands side by side with Dickinson's famous Transcendentalist neighbors Whitman, Emerson, Fuller and Thoreau. 

And yet—every dawn is first.

I think in this line you get a sense of the poem's original impulse. The poet has recovered a child's ability to see the familiar as unprecedented.

That phrase “Purple Programme” is telling. Dickinson imagines the East almost as a headmaster (or, as she would call it, a preceptor) laying out a curriculum. Every morning a new lesson appears on the horizon. And the curriculum never becomes stale and gray because the day's particular presentation is always unique and grand. Purple is a royal color. 

Each morning is the first day of school. Light is the curriculum.

      -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

P.S.

I think of William Blake’s lines,

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the bird as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

The difference is that Dickinson embraces the binding to joy in the use of the word "mine." That difference may seem small, but I think it points toward an important bridge between two opposing points of view.