762.1863.Promise This – When You be Dying –
Franklin’s (1999) Reading Version.
ED’s alternate words (in parentheses).
Promise This – When You be Dying –
Some shall (Some one) summon Me –
Mine belong Your latest Sighing –
Mine – to Belt Your Eye –
Not with Coins – though they be Minted
From An Emperor’s Hand –
Be my lips – the only Buckle
Your low (meek -) Eyes – demand-
Mine to stay – when all have wandered –
To devise once more
If the Life be too surrendered –
Life of Mine – restore –
Poured like this – My Whole (best) Libation –
Just that You should see
Bliss of Death – Life’s Bliss extol thro’
Imitating You –
Mine – to guard Your Narrow Precinct –
To seduce (entice – • persuade) the Sun
Longest (Latest) on Your South, to linger,
Largest (newest – • freshest) Dews of Morn
To demand, in Your low favor –
Lest the Jealous Grass
Greener lean – Or fonder cluster (later linger)
Round some other face –
Mine to supplicate Madonna –
If Madonna be
Could behold (regard) so far (small – dim) a Creature –
Christ – omitted -Me –
EDLex defines Madonna as Mary, a “holy woman who serves as an intermediary between humanity and Jesus Christ.” The speaker isn’t sure if Madonna exists, but if she does,
“Could [she intercede for] so (small) a Creature –
[Because] Christ – omitted – Me [from Heaven] -”
Johnson (1955) had this to say about ED’s manuscript:
“Unless the suggested changes be entirely ignored the poem remains so unfinished that ED’s final intent is beyond editorial construction. All suggested changes are written at the end of the poem and occupy two-thirds of a page. They are not in sequence and it may be questioned whether the choices here editorially sorted out have been given their correct association in every instance.”
Preest (2014) offers this explication. [Brackets] mine:
“In poem [J]622 [F688] Emily had eagerly asked for details of some unnamed person’s deathbed. In this poem she asks her beloved to promise that he will have herself summoned to his deathbed as the chief mourner.
“She wants to be the one who hears his last sigh and closes his eyes, though with her lips and not with the coins put on the eyes of the dead.
“She wants to stay when all else have gone, to see if she can restore him to life.
“She would pour herself out in weeping for him, so that he would see her praising him by pouring out her life’s bliss for him, just as he had poured out his lifeblood in death’s bliss.”
ED’s presumptuous imperative, “Promise this – when you be dying [in San Francisco] / You’ll send someone – to summon me”, without hint of grief, sounds me-centered. Ignoring Wadsworth’s wife and family, ED wants to be there when death happens because Wadsworth’s “latest sighing” [death rattle?], belongs to “Me”, “Mine”, as does the right to close his eyes, not with coins, but with my kiss.
- Franklin, R.W. 1999. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
- Preest, David. 2014. ‘Emily Dickinson: Notes on All Her Poems’. 672 pp. [For Preest’s entire PDF of 1775 commentaries (Johnson 1955) free of charge, go to:
https://studylib.net/download/8773657
Click “Not a Robot”, and download PDF.
- Dickinson, Emily. Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them . Harvard University Press.
- Johnson, T.H., ed., 1955 The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Little, Brown and Co.
“When Choice of Life — is past —
There yet remains a Love
Its little Fate to stipulate —
How small in those who live —”
For ED, death happened twice, first on May 1, 1862, when Rev. Charles Wadsworth embarked from New York harbor, bound for San Francisco. ED tells us her “little Fate” 161 poems later:
F763, Stanza’s 1 & 2
“I had no time to Hate— //
Nor had I time to Love—
But since
Some Industry must be—
The little Toil of Love—
I thought
Be large enough for Me—”
ED’s “little Toil of Love”, her “little Fate”, was composing 1026 more poems before her second death, on May 15, 1886.