The Color of the Grave is Green | Color me dead…

The Color of the Grave is Green—
The Outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Field—
Except it own a Stone—

To help the fond—to find it—
Too infinite asleep
To stop and tell them where it is—
But just a Daisy—deep—

The Color of the Grave is white—
The outer Grave—I mean—
You would not know it from the Drifts—
In Winter—till the Sun—

Has furrowed out the Aisles—
Then—higher than the Land
The little Dwelling Houses rise
Where each—has left a friend—

The Color of the Grave within—
The Duplicate—I mean—
Not all the snows c'd make it white—
Not all the Summers—Green—

You've seen the Color—maybe—
Upon a Bonnet bound—
When that you met it with before—
The Ferret—Cannot find— 

[FR424/J411]

This is actually one of Dickinson’s more straightforward poems, and another request. The mystery is less in trying to sort out “nonrecoverable deletions”—missing grammar that makes allusions a guessing game—than the more normal game of interpreting imagery (in this case colors). The one real curve ball in the poem is in sussing out the meaning of Duplicate, but we’ll get to that. The poem is six stanzas that can be divided neatly into thirds, each third reflecting on a color of the grave.

  
  The Color of the Grave is Green—
  The Outer Grave—I mean—
  You would not know it from the Field—
  Except it own a Stone—

  To help the fond—to find it—
  Too infinite asleep
  To stop and tell them where it is—
  But just a Daisy—deep—

Dickinson establishes the poem’s stake, as she often does, in the first line. Color will be the nexus round which the poem’s meaning is adjudicated. The color of the grave is green, she says, and she will devote the next seven lines giving us context for that color. It is the color of the field, presumably—the grass, the flower’s leaf, and perhaps the limb of a weeping willow. Green is the color of life. We might be inclined to forget the dead. Being green ourselves, in a sense—being alive— our understanding of death can only be of the “outer grave” and will be colored/covered by that. If not for the stone, you would not know the burial plot (or the dead) from the field. They otherwise vanish both figuratively and literally. Green is the color of spring and vigor and, in that sense, we’re not meant to be thinking of the dead. The fact of our aliveness separates us truly comprehending death. The youthful/vibrant color of green, of life and growth, is a barrier. Only the outer grave is knowable or discoverable, and that is only discoverable—by the fond—because of the Stone. The dead are too infinite asleep to be guides. In that regard, the only thing that tells where the dead is, is the daisy—alive and whose roots go deep. The suggestion, perhaps, is that the daisy’s realm is both in life and death. The daisy alone comprehends both life and death, being half above the burial ground and half among the dead—and so can tell where the dead lie. As for ourselves, what we comprehend of the daisy is the green of its stem and leaves, and the flower itself (fed by death).

  
  The Color of the Grave is white—
  The outer Grave—I mean—
  You would not know it from the Drifts—
  In Winter—till the Sun—

  Has furrowed out the Aisles—
  Then—higher than the Land
  The little Dwelling Houses rise
  Where each—has left a friend—

The next two stanzas move us from green to white, from youth to age, when the skin becomes pale and the hair gray. Now we return to graveyard in old age. As in us, so in the world. Youth and growth—green—is forever behind us. The color of the grave is white, the color of the marble stone and of bones. We begin to know it from the field. We are no longer greenly oblivious to the grave. The sun, which had been our ally in youth, a symbol of warmth, life and regeneration, becomes the teller (rather than the stone and daisy), telling us ‘where it is‘, where death lies. The sun ‘furrows the the Aisles‘, showing us the path from which cannot escape, the aisle that leads us to our own death and subsidence. We are shown the piles of dirt marking where the newly dead are buried. In each is “left a friend” in their little “Dwelling Houses”. They are “Friends” because they were of our own generation and have become the changeless generation of the dead. The piles of dirt will melt into the coffins as the coffin itself breaks and dissolves along with our bodies—all of it subsiding like the melting snow. White is the color of snow, of the grave stone, of the bones, of the life’s melting and dissolution.

  The Color of the Grave within—
  The Duplicate—I mean—
  Not all the snows c'd make it white—
  Not all the Summers—Green—

  You've seen the Color—maybe—
  Upon a Bonnet bound—
  When that you met it with before—
  The Ferret—Cannot find— 

The final stanza takes us into the dwelling houses. Dickinson doesn’t say the color of the grave is black. She calls the color “The Duplicate”. She says that we’ve maybe seen the color “upon a Bonnet bound”, such as a mourner might wear, but this is only a duplicate of the color within the grave—the color of the bonnet is in no way as final as that terrifying absolute of the grave. The living may wear the color, but the color remains a mere facsimile/duplicate. The color is unnameable. And that is the truly terrifying twist in this poem. And the genius of the poem. She cannot name it. By it’s very nature, the color has no name. To even have a name places it within our world. The color she describes is the color of absence—an absence that is no color, so unconditional in its nameless annihilation that it can only be like a color that you’ve seen elsewhere. The color even annihilates its own name. And not all the summers, now, past or future, can undo that annihilation. Not all the snows, not all the symbolism we attach to white—not the shroud, the white of the sun, poetry, the robe of Christ or the white pages of religion’s rhetoric (in other poems she has referred to her poetry as “snow”)—can undo that color, that abnegation of being, that denial and complete negation of the the world itself. Maybe you’ve seen it, she writes. That you’ve seen the color on the bonnet, in other words, is no guarantee that you’ve actually understood or comprehended that last and final “Color of the Grave”. Maybe. If you’ve understood her poem—then maybe “you’ve met with it before”. And yet, can you really? No matter how deep the ferret digs—she writes as though changing her mind—you will never find the color she’s describing. If you find it, if you think you’ve dug deeply enough, then you haven’t found it. What the ferret, or you, could find will never be the color she’s describing. This is no ride in a carriage with death personified. To see this color is to be annihilated. You may comprehend this color in a mourner’s bonnet but, to truly see this color, is to be dead.

• For a superb youtube analysis of this poem.

up in Vermont | March 4 2024