851.1864.“I want” – it pleaded – All it’s life –

851.1864.“I want” – it pleaded – All it’s life –

“I want”—it pleaded—All its life—
I want—was chief it said
When Skill entreated it—the last—
And when so newly dead—

I could not deem it late—to hear
That single—steadfast sigh—
The lips had placed as with a “Please”
Toward Eternity—
……………………………………………………………………………..

ED had no alternative words or phrases.
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Anthony Madrid on The Prowling Bee [TPB] nailed this poem, F851, so I paraphrased his interpretation [downloaded 7/13/2026; brackets are mine, LarryB]:

Stanza 1.

“I want”—it pleaded—All its life—
I want—was chief it said
When Skill entreated it—the last—
And when so newly dead—

S1.

“I want”, [I] pleaded all [my] life. I want was chiefly what [I] said, when [I] begged for skill, on [my] last day, and even when [I] was newly dead.

[Stanza 2]

I could not deem it late—to hear
That single—steadfast sigh—
The lips had placed as with a “Please”
Toward Eternity—

I could not deem that plea too late when I heard that single-minded [final] sigh that [my] lips had emitted, like the word “Please” aimed at eternity . . . .
…………………………………………………………………………

ED loves to trick readers with riddles, such as Line 3, “When Skill entreated it —”. ED requires her readers to know her tricks well enough that they understand Line 3 is inverted and really means “When my soul begged for skill”. [EDLex Def. 1d of “entreated” is “begged”].

ED played the same prank on naive readers in Line 1 of the preceding poem, ‘Defrauded I a butterfly’.
………………………………………………………………………………………………….

ED intended “I” and “it” to be nominative case, i.e., the subject and its referent pronoun in Line 1, and “Skill” is accusative case, or direct object.

“I” is ED’s soul and “it” is the possessive pronoun for “I”. “I” begs the “Skill” (accusative case, direct object) to write great poetry. [Hope I got that right.]
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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.