830.1864.The Admirations—and Contempts—of time—

830.1864.The Admirations—and Contempts—of time—

The Admirations—and Contempts—of time—
Show justest—through an Open Tomb—
The Dying—as it were a Height
Reorganizes Estimate
And what We saw not
We distinguish clear—
And mostly—see not
What We saw before—

‘Tis Compound Vision—
Light—enabling Light—
The Finite—furnished
With the Infinite—
Convex—and Concave Witness—
Back—toward Time
And forward—
Toward the God of Him—

My interpretation of the two stanzas:

After I die, the admirations and contempts of time will be “justest”. Then my readers will reorganize their estimates of my poems’ worth, and what was obscure before my death will afterward make sense.

Each generation of readers enlightens the next on the meanings of my poems, and they, in turn, enlighten the following generation to see ever deeper, compounding understanding. Each generation’s vision is finite, but their ultimate vision is infinite. That infinite vision bears witness in space, both outward and inward, and in time, both backward and forward, toward the God of Him.

ED had someone special in mind when she capitalized that last “Him”. She reserved capitalized pronouns for only God, Jesus, and Charles Wadsworth. Clearly, “Him” is not God, and the context of the poem doesn’t suggest Jesus, leaving us with Wadsworth. If so, who was the God of Wadsworth? ED seems to suggest that she, in her poems, and he, in his sermons, were converging on the same God.

The word “justest” is ED at her finest, an original adjective of superlative degree. I could not find “justest” in any dictionary.

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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.