870.1864. None can experience stint

None can experience stint
Who Bounty- have not known –
The fact of Famine – could not be
Except for Fact of Corn –

Want – is a meagre Art
Acquired by Reverse –
The Poverty that was not Wealth –
Cannot be Indigence
………………………………………………………………………………….

My interpretation, with ED’s alternative phrases in {curly brackets}:

Stanza 1.

None can experience stint
Who Bounty- have not known –
The fact of Famine – could not be {Nor fact of Famine could exist -}
Except for Fact of Corn –

S1.

Stanza 1 is two couplets, each saying you can’t know poverty unless you’ve been rich. Poverty and wealth are relative to your awareness of others’ worth.

Stanza 2.

Want – is a meagre Art
Acquired by Reverse
The Poverty that was not Wealth – {It is that Poverty was Wealth -}
Cannot be Indigence – {Enables Indigence -}

S2.

Stanza 2 also is two couplets, each saying poverty and wealth are relative to your awareness of others’ worth, but ED gives us alternatives for Lines 7-8:

S2A.

Being poor without knowing it cannot be indigence.

S2B.

Being poor after being wealthy enables indigence.

Seems to me that S2B isn’t universally true.

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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.