641.1863.What I can do – I will –

What I can do – I will –
Though it be little as a Daffodil –
That I cannot – must be
Unknown to possibility –

If ‘What I can do – I will’ sounds familiar, here’s the original version of the ‘Serenity Prayer’, currently attributed to American theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr (Wygal 1932):

“The victorious man in the day of crisis is the man who has the serenity to accept what he cannot help and the courage to change what must be altered.”

Rearranged and reformatted, Niebuhr’s ‘Serenity Prayer’ matches exactly ED’s poem, idea-for-idea:

The victorious man in the day of crisis
Is the man who has the courage to change what must be altered
And the serenity to accept
What he cannot help

This poem, ‘What I can do – I will’ (Fr461, “late 1863”, Franklin), suggests that after more than two years of healing, ED was emerging from her well documented episode of depression and “terror”:

“I had a terror – since September [1861]– I could tell to none – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground, because I am afraid.” (L338 to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, April 28, 1862).

My hypothesis is that ED’s “terror” began when Rev. Charles Wadsworth told her he was considering a move to San Francisco to rescue the failing 10-year-old Calvary Presbyterian Church. He sailed from New York Harbor with his family on May 1, 1862. He more than exceeded Calvary’s wildest hopes; even anti-Christian Mark Twain attended and praised his sermons.

Did Niebuhr read ED’s newly published (1/1/1929) book of poems? In 1929, Winnifred C. Wygal was a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary attending Reinhold Niebuhr’s lectures. She was the first to notice the similarity of Niebuhr’s prayer and ED’s poem (Wygal’s diary entry Oct. 31, 1932).

As further circumstantial evidence that Niebuhr may had read ED’s newly published book of poems, later in 1929 Niebuhr wrote:

“[R]eligion is poetry . . . religion [becomes] more compelling when vivified by adequate poetic symbols than by the poor prose of the average preacher.”
The ultimate nature of reality cannot be grasped by science alone; poetic imagination is as necessary as scientific precision.”
“How can an age which is so devoid of poetic imagination as ours be truly religious?”

References

Dickinson, Emily. The Letters of Emily Dickinson (2024). Eds. Cristanne Miller and Domhnall Mitchell. Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 1929, ‘Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic’, Chicago, Willett, Clark, and Colby.

David R. Bains. 2004. ‘Conduits of Faith: Reinhold Niebuhr’s Liturgical Thought’. Church History, Mar., 2004, 73(1): 168-194.

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After commenting on Poems 1-763 (Franklin) on The Prowling Bee’, I am convinced that (virtually) all of Emily Dickinson’s (ED’s) poems have a factual historical level in addition to their various poetic levels of meaning. The reason for her instant and continuing public adulation (1890 - present) was and is, by far, poetic. She is one of the "Greats" that she always dreamed to be, despite her lifelong refusal to publish. That refusal freed her from criticism and allowed her to explore the outer boundaries of poetic power.

More than a century of scholarly research has resulted in somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 books and published academic papers about ED. A large majority of these publications focus only on the “poetic levels” of one or more of ED’s poems. Publications that consider both the “historic level” and “poetic levels” comprise a small minority. Publications that focus only on the factual history of her life probably number less than 100. (All numbers in this paragraph are my estimates.)

Unfortunately for ED’s universe of readers, these two basic levels (historical and poetic) cannot be separated into two ivory towers. Every history-level publication that I know of includes at least some discussion of the poetic level(s).

The reverse is not true. In fact, authors of the “poetry-level” school seem to avoid commenting on the historical level, sometimes admonishing that a poem must stand on its own, without concern for its historical roots. To my knowledge, there are (virtually) no published “history-level” books or articles that totally ignore ED’s poems and their poetic levels.

Of course, ED’s refusal to publish her poems was only possible because of lifelong financial and daily social/housekeeping support by her family, especially her father and sister, respectively. In addition, throughout her life, the Dickinsons hired servants, first Negro and later Irish, some of whom became much more than housekeepers for ED.

My point is that our appreciation of ED's poems can be enhanced by understanding both poetic and historical levels of her sound and sense. We impoverish ourselves if we ignore their historical base.