FR1124/J1074
I thought I would give another of Dickinson’s poems a close reading for the start of the new year. How to pick one out? How about month, day, and year? That lands me on Count not that far that can be had.
Count not that far that can be had
Though sunset lie between
Nor that adjacent that beside
Is further than the Sun—
The poem is so short it almost makes one think that it’s a fragment. As it turns out, the original is lost (meaning the manuscript copy). The poem’s source, according to Franklin’s three volume set, is from a letter sent to Elizabeth Holland and by a copy made by Susan Dickinson. In the letter to Holland, Dickinson precedes the poem with the following:
A woman died last week, young and in hope but a little while—at the end of our garden. I thought since of the power of death, not upon affection, but its mortal signal. It is to us the Nile.
You refer to the unremitted delight to be with those we love. I suppose that to be the license not granted of God.
When I was a child, Sundays were a determined attempt to indoctrinate me in Christian mythology, but none of it stuck. The bankrupt absurdities of Christianity were evident to me, just as they were to Dickinson, at a very young age. But Dickinson’s indoctrination was far more extensive than mine and that puts me at a disadvantage when reading her. Her references to the various landmarks and events of these myths go right over my head. (Reading Vendler’s book has been very helpful in that respect.) And so I’m not sure how to interpret Dickinson’s allusion to the Nile. Given the context, however, I think it’s likely a figurative reference to a force that both gives and takes life. Typically, she uses her knowledge of Christian belief to almost absent-mindedly undermine that same belief. Rather than a personal God expressing a divine purpose in our deaths, she dispenses with that whole theology, alluding to Death as an indifferent river—a force that we cannot live without but that can live without us. At any rate, the paragraph reads almost as the first quatrain of the poem. For the fun of it, I rewrote the paragraph as Dickinson might have, had she the inclination. Her rhyming is stricter than her usual habit (perhaps because it was only one quatrain) and so I imitated that while still trying to preserve her original thoughts and wording. It was tempting to rhyme ‘while’ with ‘Nile’, but I suspect that Dickinson would have avoided a true rhyme. She also didn’t use dashes to the degree she usually does, and was sparing in her capitalization, and so I followed suit. Lastly, I adopted her habit of elision, compression and figurative language:
The term of our conclusion—final
Who loved us barred remittance—
Of Death—it is to us the Nile
For more God grants no license—
Count not that far that can be had
Though sunset lie between
Nor that adjacent that beside
Is further than the Sun—
I’m not sure how well the two quatrains really go together, but the one follows the other just as it did in Dickinson’s letter. As to the meaning of Dickinson’s quatrain, it doesn’t strike me as particularly in need of explication, but for those who might appreciate it:
Count not [do not consider] that far [distant/impossible to obtain] that can be had
Though sunset [death/distance/time] lie between
Nor that adjacent [close by us] that beside [being beside us]
Is further than the Sun [the centrality of known existence and all we know]—
Where a modern instapoet would have begun and ended their instapoem with the first two lines—the blandly comforting notion that what divides us in life and death might be overcome (without specifying exactly how) Dickinson, being Dickinson, can’t leave it there. She immediately turns the first two lines on their heads, seemingly denying what she has just asserted. But then again, maybe not. Some things that seem too lost or gone to find may yet “be had”, while what’s nearest might be insurmountably unreachable. She doesn’t suggest which applies to what, nor how to differentiate the two, but makes the point that death may not be all that divides us and that life may not be all that binds us.
- The photograph above, bought in Greenwich Village and contemporaneous with Dickinson, has written on the back of it: Emily Dickinson. However, scholars do not believe the photo to be the poet Emily Dickinson, stating (among other reasons) that there were other Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst. This is true, but were they the right age? My belief is that the photo is actually the poet Emily Dickinson. The arguments against it strike me as more arbitrary and scurrilous than the evidence in support of it—namely, that the photo has written on it: Emily Dickinson, is from the right time period, appears to be the right age, and in no way contradicts her own description of herself. Is it her hair style? None can say. That’s not an argument for or against. Would she have worn those earrings or those clothes? Again, none can say. But I personally am persuaded not just by the contemporaneous attribution, but also because it bears a striking resemblance to the famous and only known photograph we have of her—when she was a teenager and only just recovered from an illness that had caused considerable weight loss.
Happy New Year!
up in Vermont | Jan 4th 2024
PoemShape 