756.1863.Bereavement in their death to feel
(ED’s alternate words in parentheses) [LarryB’s comments in brackets]
Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen –
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs – between
For Stranger – Strangers do not mourn –
There be Immortal friends
Whom Death see first – ’tis news of this
That paralyze Ourselves –
Who – vital only to Our Thought –
Such Presence bear away
In dying – ’tis as if Our souls (World, Selves, Sun)
Absconded – suddenly –
The poem’s final stanza, with ED’s three alternative words for “souls” in parentheses, convinces me that David Preest and Jane Eberwein got close to ED’s intention:
“Jane Donahue Eberwein suggests that this may be another poem referring to the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning [1806-1861], like poems [F600, F627, & F637]. When Emily hears of Mrs Browning’s death, she is not mourning for a stranger, but for someone she had a soul ‘kinsmanship’ with when she read her poems. Mrs Browning’s ‘vitality’ may only have been present to Emily’s ‘Thought,’ but, when she heard that Mrs Browning had become immortal through death, she was paralysed, for such a ‘Presence’ had left this world that it was almost as though Emily’s own soul had fled.” [Preest 2014, p. 217]
- David Preest. 2014. ‘Emily Dickinson: Notes on All Her Poems’. 672 pp.
For Preest’s entire eBook of 1775 commentaries (Johnson 1955) in PDF format, free of charge, go to: https://studylib.net/download/8773657 Click “Not a Robot”, and download PDF.)