When One has given up One's life

When One has given up One's life
The parting with the rest
Feels easy, as when Day lets go
Entirely the West

The Peaks, that lingered last
Remain in Her regret
As scarcely as the Iodine
Upon the Cataract.


    -Fr961, J853, sheet 22, 1865


What does it mean to give up One’s life?  It doesn’t mean to die, because there is still the “parting with the rest” to do. So it is something more like acceptance of death. We can only speculate what it meant for Emily.

The first line has a hint of the tragic in it, but the rest of the poem has a sense of “easy” and of freedom from “regret.” 

This poem reads like a meditation on aging.  Cataracts, after all, tend to form on the eyes of the elderly, and life has already had its “Peaks.” In this sense, the poem is the flip side of Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." Thomas wrote this famous villanelle to his ailing father, urging him to "Rage, Rage against the dying of the light," but I wonder how Thomas's father might have felt about this. “Let me go in peace, son! Bring me that poem by Emily Dickinson.” 

The really interesting thing about this poem for me is the way “Cataract” appears to have a double meaning. Iodine was a popular cure for cataracts in the 1800s. The metaphor fits the poem beautifully because a cataract slowly clouds over the eyes. 

It is a slow “parting with the rest,” with sight itself. Once you accept death, then you accept all that comes with it, the loss of sight, loss of hearing, hair, friends, etc. Easier said than done!

But a "Cataract" is also a waterfall, and this reading makes a lot of sense too, especially as it follows the metaphor of the mountain peaks in the West. The “iodine” then would be the color of the last bit of light on the waterfall coming down from the peaks. It’s the final color of light showing on the rush of the great roaring waterfall. Dickinson has used Iodine to describe the end of a sunset before, see Fr875.

Iodine

Life is a series of awesome, but difficult peaks, as violent and tremendous as a waterfall. There is peace in letting go of all of that, and in letting go of regrets too.

At first I was trying to decide which of these two possible meanings of "Cataract" Dickinson meant, but since they are both so apt I've come to suspect that she may well have had both ideas in mind.

    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff