795.1864.Truth — is as old as God —

795.1864.Truth — is as old as God —

Two variants: Variant A (1864) is a single eight-line stanza and Variant B (1865) is two quatrains, with an alternate word, “Himself”, in Line 6.

I prefer eight-line Variant A and her original phrase in Line 6, “That he”, because of its clarity of meaning:

Truth — is as old as God —
His Twin identity
And will endure as long as He
A Co-Eternity —
And perish on the Day
That he (Himself) is borne away
From Mansion of the Universe
A lifeless Deity.

EDLex defines “Truth” as:

1. Reality; facts; actual state of things.
2. Being; exact accordance with that which is, or has been, or shall be.
3. Wisdom; verity; orthodoxy; real doctrine; sound philosophy; veracious principles; true religious belief.
4. Veracity; purity from falsehood.
5. Fact; principle; essence, as distinguished from an imitation.
6. Sincerity; practice of speaking truth; habitual disposition to speak correct principles.
7. Constancy.
8. Correct opinion.

OED Definitions of “Truth” stretch 38 pages and 8800 words.

“Truth” is an early Old English word and most of the OED definitions are now obsolete. Here are two OED definitions that are not obsolete:

Def II.5.c. Understanding of nature or reality; the totality of what is known to be true; knowledge.
Def II.6.a. Religious sense: spiritual reality as the subject of revelation or object of faith

Objective “truth” changes with new discoveries in science. In the religious sense, we like to think “truth” doesn’t change, but it does. For example, the Old Testament focuses on God as vengeful; the New Testament on God as loving and forgiving. They can’t both be true.

Clearly, there is no such thing as immutable “Truth”, either in the objective or religious sense. Our problem is deciding whether ED meant “Truth” in a mutable or immutable sense.

My take on this poem is that ED intended the latter, immutable sense, which seems wishful thinking.

An interpretation in one prose paragraph:

God is Truth and Truth is God; their identities are twins. Truth will endure as long as God endures, a co-eternity, and perish on the day that Death carries Wadsworth [lowercase “h” in “he” in Variant A and uppercase “H” in “Himself” in Variant B] away, a lifeless deity, from mansions of the universe [Earth?]

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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.