671.1863.The sweetest Heresy received

The sweetest Heresy received
That Man and Woman know –
Each Other’s Convert –
Though the Faith accommodate but Two –

The Churches are so frequent –
The Ritual – so small –
The Grace so unavoidable –
To fail – is Infidel –

ED Lexicon defines “Convert” (Line 3) and “Infidel” (Line 8), respectively, as metaphors for “Lover” and “Shameful”.

This poem is about an archtypic Christian True Believer and an archtypic Agnostic who agreed to disagree.

That spark of tension lit the fire of a friendship that lasted their lifetimes. Their marriage of minds was “The sweetest Heresy” that “Man and Woman know”. In August 1882, four months after the Christian died and four years before the Agnostic descended in a white coffin that symbolized her faithfulness to their marriage and to her poetry, ED could honestly say of Reverend Charles Wadsworth:

“He was my Shepherd from “Little Girl”hood and I cannot conjecture a world without him, so noble was he always – so fathomless – so gentle.” (L994, August 22, 1882, from ED to James D. Clark, Wadsworth’s best friend).

Never underestimate ED. (Comments on Fr 671,TPB, June 24-27, 2025)

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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.