For my birthday, my wife bought me Ralph Franklin’s 3-volume edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and — as if that weren’t enough! — the new volume of her poetry edited by Cristanne Miller. Dickinson enthusiasts know how important these editions are for anyone who wants to delve into Emily Dickinson’s unique, eccentric, mysterious poetry world.
I set a challenge for myself: open any of the Franklin volumes to any page and write something about the first poem I see. Dickinson wrote nearly 2,000 poems, and every one of them is in both the Franklin and Miller editions. I might have landed on one of her many anthologized poems, something known and beloved. Or not. But I knew whatever came up would be a challenge. Difficulty wasn’t Dickinson’s poetic strategy but rather reflected the rigors of her uncompromising and anomalous 19th century mind.
The short poem below was where I landed.
Franklin transcribed the manuscript:
That this should feel the need of Death
The same as those that lived
Is such a Feat of Irony
As never was achieved –
Not satisfied to ape the Great in his simplicity
The small must die, the same as he —
Oh the audacity –
As it turns out, I landed on one of Dickinson’s uncharted poems. If you search the Internet for it, you’ll get thousands of hits for the celebrated poem “Because I could not stop for Death” but next to nothing about this one. At the academic sites I have access to, I found nothing in the scholarship. With Franklin and Miller as my only guides, I know something about this poem’s provenance and publication history. But what about its meaning?
I am left to ponder alone.
. . . Early winter, 1870. As the deep cold begins to settle over Amherst in the final months of the year, Emily Dickinson takes hold of a piece of paper torn from a formal invitation sent to the Dickinson household from Amherst College professor and clergyman Aaron Warner and his wife. There Emily jots down a poem.
She often writes poems on whatever blank paper presents itself to her, including envelopes and chocolate wrappers. In this instance, the reverse side of a printed invitation provides a fine writing surface. The formal black typeface on the other side of the embossed paper sheet has a ghostly presence.
By the time she wrote the poem I’m reading, Dickinson’s prolific “writing period” during the 1860’s had ended. She was forty years old and had become more socially reclusive. Most likely she inscribed her thoughts alone in her bedroom at her small desk. Her handwriting was never good and it worsened as she aged, presenting a challenge to her close advocates who transcribed her poems after her death in 1886. The large and small tyrannies of the age from which she freed herself — think, Sunday church services and despised domestic chores — includes proper penmanship, and her freedom was amply exercised here.
Before grappling with meaning, I want to examine the original manuscript. One of the joys for Dickinson enthusiasts is having open access to images of all the works in her own hand.
IAMBIC FEAT
Looking at the handwritten original, I like to imagine that the poem’s first two lines composed themselves whole in Dickinson’s mind, sending her to her writing desk. There are, after all, no self-edits in those lines.
“That this should feel the need of Death/ The same as those that lived”: Emily is humming in her familiar hymn (or common) meter. Think, “Amazing Grace.” You can sing the whole poem to that tune. The iambic rhythm is as familiar as her own heartbeat. (Buh-BAH-buh-BAH-buh-BAH-buh-BAH.)
“Is such a Feat of Irony/ As never was achieved -” Having captured her first thought, she begins with line 3 to think “out loud” on the page, setting forth numerous word choices. At least for a moment, she thinks the “Feat of Irony” marking life and death might better be expressed as a “stroke of Irony,” or perhaps a “hight” (likely a “height,” given Dickinson’s propensity for misspelling) or a “pass” of Irony. She crosses those choices out. “Feat of Irony” it is.
Emily writes two versions of line 4, favoring “as never was achieved” over “as makes one hide its head.” Momentarily she wonders if “as never was beheld” works better. No, the “Feat of Irony” was “never achieved,” she thinks, rather than “never beheld.”
The first stanza is now complete. It has perfect iambic meter, and the spaces after the words “Death,” “lived,” and “Irony” provide clear line breaks establishing the length of each line.
“Not satisfied to ape the Great in his simplicity.” Emily sees she is running out of room on the page, and while she wishes to maintain the same meter in the next (and final) stanza, she abandons line breaks. It is only on the page — and not in the ear — that the hymnal stanza pattern ends.
Although Dickinson adhered to the metrical requirements of hymn-like common verse, she wrote the line “Not satisfied to ape the Great in his simplicity” without a needed line break. Accordingly, her future editors treat it as a single line, even though it would scan perfectly well as lines 5 and 6 in a standard format: “Not satisfied to ape the Great / in his simplicity”.
“The small must die, the same as he.” In the penultimate line, Emily chooses “must die” and crosses out “do die.” She pens an alternative to “the same as he” but doesn’t cross it out: “as well as He.” She is undecided. I’ll tend to this choice later, she thinks.
The difference between “he” and “He” strikes me as significant, no? Her future editors decide to keep the original phrase and drop the alternative. They couldn’t keep both because, apart from the awkward repetition, the poem’s metrical form does not tolerate two more iambs on this line. Dickinson would have never placed a six-beat iambic line in a poem of this sort.
She feels the need for an exclamatory ending but is unsure. Oh the — what? She sets out five words.
Look at the choices Dickinson set out for herself:
“What a pomposity.” “What an absurdity.” “What a perversity.” “Oh the pomposity.” All stricken. Then Dickinson found her word.
Audacity.
SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETEST –
As far as I know, what happened next at the writing desk will never be known. Did Dickinson work on That this should feel the need for Death after her first draft? Or did she toss it aside to await posthumous discovery along with hundreds of other loose scraps of poems, thoughts, fragments?
What is known is that Dickinson’s growing audience did not see this small poem until 1945, seventy-five years after she composed it and nearly sixty years after her death. No more than 10 of her poems were published in her lifetime, none with her name and some without her consent. Although her family and friends knew that she wrote poetry, no one was aware of the magnitude of her production.
During her final illness, Dickinson asked her trusted Irish maid Maggie to destroy her correspondence and poetry. Maggie complied only in part. She burned the letters. (It was customary in the old days to protect a decedent’s privacy by destroying their correspondence.) The placed all the poems into the dresser drawers in Dickinson’s bedroom. After her death, sister Lavinia found what must be poetry’s greatest mother lode of gold in the piles of unseen poems, hundreds of which Dickinson had re-copied onto paper sheets and hand-sewed into little booklets, now called “fascicles.” A greater number were written on loose pieces of paper. This veritable treasure trove had to be read, sorted, and organized, and Lavinia was determined to publish the best of it.
Emily Dickinson’s first book of poetry entered the world in 1890 and it was an immediate success. Its popularity led to the publication of two more volumes in the next five years. More found their way into print over the decades. And within a hundred years, Dickinson had ascended to a Heaven of globally beloved, foundational English-language poets. Her companions are Shakespeare and her contemporary Whitman (whom she never read but heard was disgraceful).
The obscure poem my fickle finger landed on among her 1,789 poems was not one that Dickinson shared with others. Throughout her life she sent poems to approximately 40 people, mostly to her beloved sister-in-law Susan Dickinson and to her “preceptor” and editor Thomas Higginson. That this should feel the need of Death was not one of those.
Nor was it selected by Dickinson for binding into a fascicle. (By 1870 she had all but stopped organizing her poetry in this way).
Nor was it among the poems first published selected by her posthumous editors in the 1891 and 1895. Nor did it trickle into other volumes published in 1914, 1924, 1929, or 1935.
Not until a 1945 volume entitled “Bolts of Melody” could the world’s readers ponder That this should feel the need of Death. As far as I can tell, until then, its only life was on the reverse side of a formal invitation.
It was included of course in subsequent complete and variorum editions by Thomas Johnson in 1955 and 1960 (which kickstarted modern Dickinson studies) and my two guides, Ralph Franklin and Cristanne Miller.
Accordingly, some unknown number of people have read the poem since 1945, but I haven’t found anyone who has written about it. Someone somewhere has to have addressed this enigma of a poem. Since my curiosity is greater than my access to resources, I will publish this post and then continue to look. And maybe a reader of this post will weigh in. Feel free.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Time to grapple. Time to set aside contextual facts and look at the words scribbled on the back of that 19th century dinner invitation.
Again, the poem:
That this should feel the need of Death
The same as those that lived
Is such a Feat of Irony
As never was achieved –
Not satisfied to ape the Great in his simplicity
The small must die, the same as he –
Oh the audacity –
The second word “this” brings up the first critical question: Who (or what) is the this that “feel[s] the need of Death”? It is the central mystery of the poem.
“This” who lives now is likened to “those that lived” before. “This” feels Death or its presence just as “those” once did. Is “this” a non-living thing like love? Faith? Or is “this” someone presently living, compared to “those” who once lived? And who, by the way, are “those that lived”? Ancestors? Family members?
Simply put, in the first two lines, who or what are “this” and “those”?
We learn in lines 3 and 4 that the need for Death shared by “this” and “those” is a feat of irony never previously achieved. More than a “stroke” of irony or even the “hight” of irony, which Dickinson considered and rejected. The irony is an unprecedented Feat. That’s mighty ironic.
On to stanza two: the “small” are the subject of the stanza, and they must die “the same as he.” There is a clear parallelism between stanza 1 where both “this” in the present feels the need of Death “the same as those” in the past and stanza 2 where the “small” must die “the same as he.”
What else do we know about “the small”? They were not “satisfied to ape the Great.” What a peculiar turn of phrase. In Dickinson’s time, the verb “to ape” had the same meaning it has today — to imitate, mimic, copy. But of all the ways one may aspire to be like the Great, “aping” it is surely the best way to diminish what you aspire to. Servile flattery is not what the gods want of us, Marcus Aurelius said in his Meditations. (Whether the Dickinson library included the Meditations, I cannot determine.)
In any case, “the Great” is another unnamed entity. The “small” have eschewed the Great’s simplicity, but they still must die just as “he” died.
So back to the core question: What or who is “this” (in the first line) that needs to “feel the need of Death”? Is Dickinson referring to her beloved dog Carlo whose death affected her for the rest of her life? Perhaps she is holding a gentle mouse in her hand? A flower? Is that the grand irony here, that small things like great things feel the need for death, the approach of death? Or is Dickinson tapping her hand against her heart and saying “this heart must die just as those died who lived and who I loved”?
Or perhaps “this” refers to Dickinson as she points to herself, saying “How fantastically ironic that this, this I, me, this thing called Emily Dickinson, feels the need and presence of Death the same as those that once lived (in stanza 1) and the same as he (in stanza 2)?
I think we are getting somewhere. And it leads to the second great question: who is “he”? Or, as Dickinson pondered in the unchosen phrase, “He”? Capital “H”.
It’s starting to look a lot like Christ.
Dickinson famously established her independent-mindedness when, as a young student at the Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary in Worcester, Massachusetts, she was the only student who didn’t rise when students were called upon to declare their belief in Christ. For a teenager in a devout Calvinist household in a community swept up in the religious fervor of the 1840’s, this act required a precocious steely determination. As she wrote in a now-popular poem, “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church — / I keep it, staying at Home — / With a Bobolink for a Chorister — / And an Orchard, for a Dome –” Dickinson had a free and independent mind, and she wasn’t “satisfied to ape” others in her thinking. Especially when it came to spirituality and religion. This is a good part of why, I think, she continues to wow people around the world into the 21st century.
Dickinson struggled with faith and doubt throughout her life. She didn’t reject God or Christ, but she simply had to accept them on her own terms, not someone else’s, not the Church’s.
And so it might be said, she was “not satisfied” to apishly follow in the path of her Church or of the “Great.” Oh the audacity! And how supremely ironic that her small rebellions against the great Church and Christ, her perceived infidelity, ironically doesn’t matter because, as it turns out, everyone feels the need of the Death, Death makes equal demands on us all, believers and non-believers, “those” in the past and “this” person that I am in the present and everyone else. We all die as he, Christ, died.
Pompous? Perverse? Absurd? No. Audacious.
Here it is one more time:
That this should feel the need of Death / The same as those that lived/ Is such a Feat of Irony/ As never was achieved –
Not satisfied to ape the Great in his simplicity/ The small must die, the same as he -Oh the audacity –
And here’s my “transcription”:
That I should feel Death/ just as my more faithful predecessors did/ is an irony/ of the greatest magnitude –
Because I who never followed the chosen path,/ I who am small, I must die just like Christ or anyone else died/ Oh the audacity!
It’s cryptic Dickinson, I’m not an academic, and hooboy! I could be way off in my interpretation. The audacity! I do see other ways of reading some of the poem’s words, but nothing hangs together for me except what I’ve described here. That’s the “essential oil” I have wrung from the poem. (And, by the way, there’s a chance I am the first person to write about it. A feat of irony, perhaps.)
