738.1863.No Other can reduce Our

No Other can reduce Our
Mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it be Nought –
A Period from hence –

But Contemplation for
Cotemporaneous Nought
Our Mutual Fame – that haply
Jehovah – recollect –

No Other can exalt Our
Mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it exist –
A Period from hence –

Invited from Itself
To the Creator’s House –
To tarry an Eternity –
His – shortest Consciousness –

To begin, ED composed three variants of F738 (A, B, C). DeGraff (2024) presents Variant A, and Johnson (1955) and Franklin (1999) published Variant B, which is the version she sent Sue in 1865. Here are the three variants for comparison:

Variant A Second half 1863 Fascicle 36

No Other can reduce Our
Mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it be Nought –
A Period from hence –

But Contemplation for
Cotemporaneous Nought –
Our Mutual Fame – that haply
Jehovah – recollect –

No Other can exalt (reduce) Our
Mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it exist –
A period from hence –

Invited from Itself
To the Creator’s House –
To tarry an Eternity –
His – shortest Consciousness –

Variant B 1865 To Sue

“No Other can reduce
Our Mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it be Nought (exist) –
A Period from hence –
But Contemplation for
Cotemporaneous Nought –
Our only competition
Jehovah’s estimate

Emily”

Variant C 1865

No other can reduce
Our mortal Consequence
Like the remembering it be nought
A period from hence
But Contemplation for
Cotemporaneous nought (Nought)-
Our mutual fame, that haply (Our only Competition)
Jehovah recollect (Jehovah’s Estimate)

Franklin (1998) suggested that “The placement of “Our” at the end of line 1 [in Variant A] may have been a copying error [by ED], not repeated thereafter [in Variants B & C]”.

ED’s Line 2 in all variants (including emended Variant A), “Our Mortal Consequence”, can be read at least two ways, as her poems or as her soul. ED posits her poems may amount to “Nought – / A Period from hence”, but there’s nothing coy about ED suggesting God might disagree: “Our only competition / Jehovah’s estimate”. On occasion, ED feigned she did not care about fame, but this poem (Variant B) belies her posturing. She really hoped she had Jehovah on her side, and she did.

As to “Our Mortal Consequence”, that could mean her poems (mortal consequence = extant poems), or capitalized “Mortal Consequence” may mean her soul, what’s left over after her physical body rots in Amherst’s West Cemetery. ED seems to care more about her poems’ immortality than about her soul’s, so my vote is that “Our Mortal Consequence” means her poems.

In 2022, Christiane Miller published a 3-paragraph history of ED’s editing of ‘No Other can reduce’ in her ‘Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson’ (excerpt from Page 226):

“Dickinson copied “No Other can reduce Our / Mortal Consequence” (M370 and M462, Fr738, J982) around the second half of 1863 and included it in a fascicle now numbered 36. Around 1865, she sent the first two stanzas of this four-stanza poem to Susan, without contextualizing comment, rewriting the last two lines of the second stanza and moving “Our” from the end of line 1 to the beginning of line 2, making a more conventionally metrical opening. In this version, lines 7–8 read: “Our single Competition / Jehovah’s Estimate.” In the fascicle copy, they read: “Our Mutual Fame – that haply / Jehovah – recollect –”.

“This poem is particularly interesting because around the time she sent two stanzas to Susan, Dickinson made a second fair copy to retain, which—like the version to Susan—both included only the first two stanzas and altered the line break in the opening lines (M 462). This copy maintained the fascicle version of lines 7–8 (with different capitalization and punctuation) but included the final lines sent to Susan as alternatives, slightly revised, below a long, drawn line. In this version, the poem ends: “Our mutual fame, that haply / Jehovah recollect [line across the page] Our only Competition / Jehovah’s Estimate.” (see Figure 13.1).

“No Other can reduce Our” was completed as a poem, without alternatives and apparently without thought of a specific audience, before it was circulated—as Franklin’s numbering indicates (Fr738A). When Dickinson returned to the poem around two years later, it is unclear whether she first rewrote it to retain, with an imagined alternative, or first sent a revised version to Susan, then revised it again, keeping the (slightly altered) version circulated as part of her record.

Characteristically, Franklin lists the copy sent to Susan as 738B and the unbound sheet (“Set”) copy as 738C. If Dickinson made the unbound sheet copy before sending the stanzas to Susan, it could imply that the version circulated was her final word on the poem, or that the copy to Susan constituted one manifestation of what she might do with the now-revised poem. If the circulated version came first, then it indeed might have been a trial run, as Franklin surmises, but in this case the trial led to no decisive conclusion and even its alternative lines were revised for retention.”

Cristanne Miller. 2022. Writing for Posterity: Editing, Evidence, and Sequence in Dickinson’s Composition and Circulation of Poems, pp. 217-234 [in] Miller, Cristanne; Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, Eds. ‘The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson’, Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition.

In his ‘Notes on Emily Dickinsons’ poems’ (no longer available on the web), David Preest informed us “This stanza [Stanza 1, Variant A], gloomily stating that ‘No Other [thing] can reduce/our mortal Consequence’ like knowing that soon we shall not exist,’ was in the original version of the poem the first of a pair of stanzas of eight lines each {Preest errs, Variant A manuscript is four quatrains]. The second stanza triumphantly proclaimed that ‘No other [thing] can exalt/our mortal Consequence’ like the belief that we shall exist again. Emily’s final version, two years later, omitted the second stanza.”

I much prefer ED’s four-quatrain Variant A because of its contrast between Stanzas 1-2 and Stanzas 3-4. It tells a more complete story than Variants B or C.

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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.