816.1864.I could not drink it, Sweet

816.1864.I could not drink it, Sweet

Two variants. I prefer Variant B with “Sweet” replaced by “Sue” and signed “Emily”.

I could not drink it, Sweet,
Till You had tasted first,
Though cooler than the Water was
The Thoughtfulness of Thirst.

My interpretation of ‘I could not drink it, Sweet’: (Fr816):

“I could not accept Christ, Sue, till you had done it first, though sweeter than Christ was your concern for my salvation.”

The coincidence of four words, “tasted” / “water” / “cooler” / “thirst”, in this 21-word quatrain and in one sentence of a letter ED wrote to her friend Abiah Root on March 28, 1846 (JL11) makes me wonder whether Fr816 is about ED’s spiritual salvation versus ED’s rejection of Christ as her soul’s savior, at least to Sue’s way of thinking.:

“Dearest Abiah,
· · · · ·
“I determined to devote my whole life to his service & desired that all might taste of the stream of living water from which I cooled my thirst.”
· · · · ·
Yours. Emily E. Dickinson –

Sue was a devout Christian and, during the 1880s, turned increasingly to the rituals of High Church (Anglo-Catholicism). She even considered becoming a Roman Catholic (Armand 1985).

During the 1880s, Sue spent almost every Sabbath for six years establishing a Sunday school in Logtown, a poor village in present-day Belchertown, not far from Amherst (Dorey 1960). Perhaps Sue was concerned about ED’s refusal to accept Christ as her savior and had offered to accompany ED to church.

This poem may be ED’s polite but firm RSVP.

Barton Levi St. Armand, 1985, Emily Dickinson and her Culture: the Soul’s Society, Cambridge Univ. Press, 368 pp.

Kenney A. Dorey, 1960, , Belchertown Town History, Dan Fitzpatrick (ed), 2005. 9 pp.

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

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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.