815.1864.To this World she returned.

815.1864.To this World she returned

To this World she returned
But with a tinge of that
A Compound manner
As a Sod
Espoused a Violet —
That chiefer to the Skies
Than to Himself allied
Dwelt hesitating, half of Dust
And half of Day the Bride.

My interpretation of Fr815 (Variant A):

To this world she returned, but with a tinge of a dual nature, as if a shovel of sod sported a violet that gave more allegiance to the skies than to the sod in which it hesitantly grew, half Earth’s “Dust” and half Heaven’s “Bride”.

How ED’s poems repeat themselves! Poem after poem describes the formative experience of her life, a spiritual romance that she believed would end with an eternal marriage in Heaven to Wadsworth, as she believed he had promised.

At its surface level, F815 is about Gertrude Vanderbilt’s near-death experience. Line 1, “To this World she returned”, implies that “she” had died and later “returned” from Heaven.

At a deeper level, this poem is about ED herself. She was the one who had died and gone to Heaven. While there, she and Wadsworth had met and married, as he had promised. After the marriage, ED returned to “this World”, now half Earth’s “Dust” and half Heaven’s “Bride”.

ED had never met Gertrude Vanderbilt, but Sue informed her of her friend’s near-death experience in a letter. At that time, September 1864, ED was in Boston for eye treatment. Apparently, ED took the hint and composed the get-well poem as a favor to Sue.

I wonder whether Mrs. Vanderbilt had any inkling of ED’s intent, any vague idea this poem had anything to do with her being shot by an irate rejected suitor of her maid or her recovery from said shot.

‘To this World she returned’ is one weird get-well poem

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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.