794.1864.From Us She wandered now a Year

794.1864.From Us She wandered now a Year

ED composed two variants of Fr794, Variant A in 1864 and Variant B in 1865. Variant A had eight lines in a single stanza. Variant B (1865) split the poem into two quatrains and used alternate words in Lines 5 and 8. I much prefer ED’s original Variant A:

From Us She wandered now a Year,
Her tarrying, unknown,
If Wilderness prevent her feet
Or that Ethereal Zone
No Man has seen and lived
We ignorant must be—
We only know what time of Year
We felt the Mystery.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (F. Scott Fitzgerald. February, 1936. ‘The Crack-Up’. Esquire magazine).

“Dickinson contrasts two possibilities for the deceased: the “Wilderness”, an earthly, physical state, and the “Ethereal Zone”, a supernatural or spiritual realm.” (Google AI).

EDLex defines “Wilderness” as “Emptiness; bleakness; desolation; hollowness”. It defines “Ethereal” as: “Heavenly; celestial; seraphic; of spirit; existing beyond mortality”.

An interpretation of Fr794, in a prose paragraph:

She died a year ago, but we don’t know where she’s lingering. We can’t know whether she’s stumbling in some wilderness or living in Heaven, which no mortal has seen or experienced. We only know that we felt mystified after she died.

PS. The word “Wilderness” brings to mind Luke 4: 1-2:

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness,
Being forty days tempted of the devil. And in those days he did eat nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered.

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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.