‘Twas warm — at first — like Us —
Until there crept upon
A Chill — like frost upon a Glass —
Till all the scene — be gone.
The Forehead copied stone —
The Fingers grew too cold
To ache — and like a Skater’s Brook —
The busy eyes — congealed —
It straightened — that was all —
It crowded Cold to Cold —
It multiplied indifference —
As Pride were all it could —
And even when with Cords —
‘Twas lowered, like a Weight —
It made no Signal, nor demurred,
But dropped like Adamant.
The vote is in. All published reviewers and TPB commenters on this poem agree on the obvious, it is about a corpse. But before we close the coffin, I’d like to take a second look for a metaphor level. As a mature poet, ED’s poems typically have two or more levels. If this death poem has only one, the literal one, it would be an unusual ED poem.
My guess is that ‘Twas warm — at first — like Us —’ (F614, 1863) is a metaphor describing the death a love relationship that ED thought would last for the rest of her life and then eternally in Heaven. The funeral was May 1, 1862, when Reverend Charles Wadsworth boarded a ship in New York Harbor and set sail to San Francisco. She had to be extremely circumspect in this poem because its metaphor meaning could ruin the lives of both Wadsworth and her.
∙See the explication of the previous poem, F613, ‘The Day that I was crowned’, on this blog, ‘ED-LarryB’.