I measure every Grief I meet

With narrow, probing, eyes – 

I wonder if It weighs like Mine – 

Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long – 

Or did it just begin – 

I could not tell the Date of Mine – 

It feels so old a pain – 

I wonder if it hurts to live – 

And if They have to try – 

And whether – could They choose between – 

It would not be – to die – 

I note that Some – gone patient long – 

At length, renew their smile –  

An imitation of a Light

That has so little Oil – 

I wonder if when Years have piled –  

Some Thousands – on the Harm –  

That hurt them early – such a lapse

Could give them any Balm –  

Or would they go on aching still

Through Centuries of Nerve – 

Enlightened to a larger Pain –  

In Contrast with the Love –  

The Grieved – are many – I am told –  

There is the various Cause –  

Death – is but one – and comes but once –  

And only nails the eyes –  

There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –  

A sort they call "Despair" –  

There's Banishment from native Eyes – 

In sight of Native Air –  

And though I may not guess the kind –  

Correctly – yet to me

A piercing Comfort it affords

In passing Calvary –  

To note the fashions – of the Cross –  

And how they're mostly worn –  

Still fascinated to presume

That Some – are like my own – 

ED characterizes her vocation in another poem: “The Poets light but Lamps.” She indicates the poet’s power to illuminate but also her inability at times to penetrate.

“I measure ever Grief” glows with this surface level lamplight. The voice is eerily, even stonily exterior to the emotionally wrought experience of grief, her own and others’. The light shines around but not into the caverns and corridors of felt experience – not least because, in ordinary society, these feelings are typically unspoken, cloaked, and private. She assesses and sympathizes with others’ griefs, but doesn’t query or connect, merely “wonders.” 

To me, she’s remarking upon the intimacy of grief which, like the intimacy of personhood, is never (or rarely) fully available to anyone else. Much of our DNA is shared, but it’s not identical. 

In the middle stanzas, where she muses about whether there’s “any balm” for the grieving, she impishly suggests the truism about time healing all wounds is, well, crock. (Elsewhere: “An actual suffering strengthens / As sinews do with age.”) If there’s any edification or enlightenment to be had for one’s suffering, it’s only in coming into awareness of still “larger Pain.” That oil in the fourth stanza is a non-renewable resource. (Elsewhere: “We can find no scar / But internal difference / Where the meanings are.”)

The seventh stanza acts like a hinge, introducing a taxonomy of grief. Turns out death is but one cause. Punsters can have a festival with the line, “And only nails the eyes,” nodding to the crucifixion, yes, but also to the illusion of the separate self: “only” the “I’s” die. Something else – soul? spirit? energy? love? – lives on.

Stanza 8 to me is the business:

There's Grief of Want – and grief of Cold –  

A sort they call "Despair" –  

There's Banishment from native Eyes – 

In sight of Native Air –  

Grief comes in many flavors, but it is always a response to separation, be it from nourishment or warmth, or from one’s beloved, or from one’s beloved homeland. Something in us, our ‘native eyes,’ knows what it longs for, even if our ‘sight’ cannot be satisfied. That one cannot see air is this poem’s brilliant little gesture: it’s the teasing proximity to whatever it is we’re grieving for that’s torturous, the immediacy, the vitality.

In the final two stanzas the poet melds back into the crowd and finds her community. Again, no two people experience or ‘wear’ their grief identically, and yet we all have it. To be human is to love, and to lose, and to long for. Is there comfort in this fact? Sure. And yet it’s ‘piercing’ too – yes, crucifying.

It was not Death, for I stood up,

And all the Dead, lie down -

It was not Night, for all the Bells

Put out their Tongues, for Noon.

It was not Frost, for on my Flesh

I felt Siroccos - crawl -

Nor Fire - for just my marble feet

Could keep a Chancel, cool -

And yet, it tasted, like them all,

The Figures I have seen

Set orderly, for Burial

Reminded me, of mine -

As if my life were shaven,

And fitted to a frame,

And could not breathe without a key,

And ’twas like Midnight, some -

When everything that ticked - has stopped -

And space stares - all around -

Or Grisly frosts - first Autumn morns,

Repeal the Beating Ground -

But most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool -

Without a Chance, or spar -

Or even a Report of Land -

To justify - Despair.

One of ED’s “What is it?!” poems. She teases us along before readily answering the question in the poem’s final word.

It is despair.

So why bother with the tease? Because those of us who know/experience despair never find an answer sufficient to our condition. When we feel ourselves numb, beleaguered, terribly hot, dreadfully cold, “fitted to a frame” (crucified? destined? measured for a coffin?), we don’t accept ‘despair’ as the cause – too vague, opaque, unscourced – but rather consult this Rolodex of prospective explanations and analogies.

Of these, I’m drawn to the last two stanzas: the sense that time no longer ticks away in even increments but rather in starts and stops, and space is dizzingly animate and disorienting; or “grisly frosts” – that first clamp of a hard freeze and all it promises by way of along winter. Even more, to be whelmed at sea, at such great remove from safety/harbor that we don’t have a ‘chance’ or any other pretext (like a ‘spar,’ (conflict) or a sliver of land on the horizon, whence to declaim, “if only I could just get there!) to justify or explain this condition that has no explanation.

If this poem works it’s in the way so many of her great poems do: the meaning of the poem is in the embodied experience of the poem.

Re: despair, see too her longest: “I cannot live with You –”

My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Nods to two major life events, traumas or griefs, and her wondering about the prospect of a third.

But the wondering isn’t purely anxious—it’s respectful, even eager. Whatever happened, the felt response was/is akin to an “unveiling” by God. It’s “so huge” it’s unlikely to happen again and “hopeless” to wish for. And yet “hopeless” winks the other way, too: the experience confers hopelessness, destitution.

All of this ordinary is Dickinsonian grist until the zinger of the final couplet: We know heaven on account of its disruption, our intact lives rent by loss and separation and heartache. And, while we suffer mightily in this hell, it’s the only way we can know (recognize, appreciate) heaven.

I like how heaven and hell are secularized here. They’ve been seized and consecrated and etherealized by the church; Dickinson brings them back to earth and situates them as part and parcel of life as we live it.

Your thoughts don’t have words every day

They come a single time

Like signal esoteric sips

Of the communion Wine

Which while you taste so native seems

So easy so to be

You cannot comprehend its price

Nor its infrequency

Working on a new/next novel, feeling very much at sea – my commitment vastly greater than my confidence – I’m drawn again to Dickinson’s musings on artistry and writing. This one’s more direct than most: the cost, infrequency, unreliability, and mysterious origins of your “words” is such that you best assume your supplicant pose and just get it while/when/how it comes. I’m learning this anew as I work on a sprawling, multiple points-of-view novel. 

I appreciate her likening a writer’s abiding their process to communion. There’s esoteria involved, and faith. Most of all there’s showing up. The well, as it were, needs to be utilized to in order to flow, empty, re-fill, and run clear.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Is there a more succinct statement of purpose and metier in Dickinson?

Hit directly with a bolt of truth, we shudder, overwhelmed and blinded. But hit “slant,” we are dazzled.

I like the nod to slanted light here, something any painter or photographer understands only too well, but even more the nod to art, poetry, and fiction: insert a long pause before “lies” in line two. “Lies” is an appositive of “Success in Circuit” (as well as a verb)—Dickinson’s nod to the paradox that in art and literature, in poetry and fiction, in lies, we find dazzling truth.

The Props assist the House

Until the House is built

And then the Props withdraw

And adequate, erect,

The House support itself

And cease to recollect

The Augur and the Carpenter –

Just such a retrospect

Hath the perfected Life –

A Past of Plank and Nail

And slowness – then the scaffolds drop

Affirming it a Soul –

I like the heartlessness of this poem about becoming. And I find it revolting.

The manifold references to Christ’s becoming (the carpenter, the perfected life, the past of plank and nail) are mere appropriations—the affirmed soul is a sort of Christ, an ordinarily perfected life. And while this station or status is contingent on props and scaffolding (not to mention solid auguring), in the end the occupant is forgetful (disdainful?) of its origins (“cease to recollect / the augur and the carpenter”), of its suffering (the past of plank and nail), of its “slowness” in becoming. Parents beware.

Above all, I appreciate Dickinson’s characterization of this “affirmed soul.” Not strong, invulnerable, or brilliant – merely “adequate and erect.” We see this elsewhere in ED, as in “a soul admitted to itself / polar privacy.”

The Missing All—prevented Me
From missing minor Things.
If nothing larger than a World's
Departure from a Hinge—
Or Sun's extinction, be observed—
'Twas not so large that I
Could lift my Forehead from my work
For Curiosity.

We have a binary here at home—proximates and ultimates—ordinarily invoked to remind one of us (usually me) to stay local with our attention, or at least not to make a mountain out of a, say, gopher hole.

ED’s “minor things” comprise the gift of engaged attention and honest curiosity. The absence of ultimate meaning, and her cultivated comfort with uncertainty (“The Missing All”), allows her to see, notice, play, arrange—which is to say, to live in the now, and to write poetry.

I like the way “For Curiosity” winks in both directions: next to my work, I’m incurious about catastrophe (“Sun’s extinction,” etc.); and, I work for curiosity.

They say that "Time assuages"—
Time never did assuage—
An actual suffering strengthens
As Sinews do, with age—

Time is a Test of Trouble—
But not a Remedy—
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady—

Easy to dismiss this as creepy veneration of suffering, and it may be.

But it’s also a definitional poem: these ‘sinews’ that hold us together, what are they made of? How are they strengthened? Do we too readily confuse passing annoyances for suffering?

“Time is a test of trouble”: time tests trouble, authenticating it as suffering or proving it “no malady.”

And: time is a trouble-filled test. Suffering is unavoidable. Very Buddhist, this. And yet suffering is, alas, strengthening, enabling our parts to adhere.

The stuff that’s resolved with the passing of time? It doesn’t qualify.

To own the Art within the Soul

The Soul to entertain

With Silence as a Company

And Festival maintain

Is an unfurnished Circumstance

Possession is to One

As an Estate perpetual

Or a reduceless Mine.

Like Prairie/Bee and “He Fumbles at your Soul,” another about art, writing, and inspiration.

My dad once asked me what I made of Dickinson’s conception of the soul. I stammered out an idea or two – I know he liked “Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches on the soul” – but I think a richer reading of her soul-referencing poems steers us into art and writing. 

Two things here: I like the silent festival of artistic endeavor – all the noise is internal. 

And what is the essential property of creative enterprise? Unadornment, “unfurnished.” How curious that so much of what art does is decorative (even in Dickinson: “She dealt her pretty words like blades”), and yet what she’s suggesting here is something purer, closer to and expressive of the source (aka the soul).

Second: this poem claims position and territory. It’s about ‘ownage’ – self-possession, artistic commitment, silence. The estate is perpetual because it’s as vast as the imagination; the mine is “reduceless” because, like a well, it replenishes itself. Also, and emphatically, the “mine” is a claiming of space, time, attention, commitment. This work/activity is mine, it’s as much of my soul as I can know, and I’m not letting go.

People who read Dickinson’s reclusiveness as avoidant may be missing what it is she shut the door in order to explore – the mine of her extraordinary artistry.

We grow accustomed to the Dark —

When Light is put away —

As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp

To witness her Good bye —

A Moment — We Uncertain step

For newness of the night —

Then — fit our Vision to the Dark —

And meet the Road — erect —

And so of larger — Darknesses —

Those Evenings of the Brain —

When not a Moon disclose a sign —

Or Star — come out — within —

The Bravest — grope a little —

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead —

But as they learn to see —

Either the Darkness alters —

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight —

And Life steps almost straight.

One of ED’s hundreds of analogy poems begins with a poetic rendering of an ordinary phenomenon, your eyes adjusting to less/little light. But the “larger darknesses” in stanza 3 point to something else – depression, confusion, uncertainty, crisis. 

The only way through is to fumble about and “learn to see,” to “adjust to midnight.” Requires bravery. Causes bruises.

The “almost” in the final line honors the gravity and the change – life is never “straight” again.

We learn in the Retreating

How vast an one

Was recently among us —

A Perished Sun

Endear in the departure

How doubly more

Than all the Golden presence

It was — before —

Sunset, death – whatever it is, I like the tension in/around the irony: “Endear in the departure.”

It isn’t that the one or the sun (or the “son” / Jesus) is actually any “vaster” now that they’ve fallen over the horizon, but rather they’re more endearing to the observer, the lover, the faithful. We perceive the golden presence of the beautiful, the admired, the loved more fully in their absence.

This strikes me as an evocation of a common, event trite experience as well as a warning label on the life of the mind. The flat, ordinary language of the last line – “It was — before—” nods to our insufficient capacity for appreciation in the moment, our parsimony of perception.

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full Music on —
He stuns you by degrees —
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers — further heard —
Then nearer — Then so slow
Your Breath has time to straighten —
Your Brain — to bubble Cool —
Deals — One — imperial — Thunderbolt —
That scalps your naked Soul —

When Winds take Forests in the Paws —
The Universe — is still —

Music? inspiration? seduction? assault? death? The “he” of the opening line resists a single or obvious antecedent.

I like this one for what it proposes about the vulnerability of the working artist and/or anyone of “brittle nature” who’s open to “full music.” The poem carves away our protective layers with steady stripping and seductive “stunning,” and then the direct hit delivered in distinctive cadence – “Deals—one—imperial—Thunderbolt—” – to yield a form of ultimate exposure, the “naked soul.”

But the zinger, as it were, is the ridiculous mixed metaphor of the final couplet – paw-endowed winds rendering the formerly whirling, roiling universe “still.” I like the other reading of ‘still’ too – the universe is unchanged, as it’s been all along, still there. Nothing’s happened, and yet something has shifted, some “internal difference / where the meanings are” (from A Certain Slant of Light).