831.1864. Till Death—is narrow Loving—

831.1864. Till Death—is narrow Loving—

Till Death—is narrow Loving—
The scantest Heart extant
Will hold you till your privilege
Of Finiteness—be spent—

But He whose loss procures you
Such Destitution that
Your Life too abject for itself
Thenceforward imitate—

Until—Resemblance perfect—
Yourself, for His pursuit
Delight of Nature—abdicate—
Exhibit Love—somewhat—

My interpretation of ‘Till Death—is narrow Loving—’, Fr831, by stanza:

In a marriage , to love someone ‘til death do us part is narrow loving. Even the heart least capable of love will, for many reasons, keep you married until you die. All you have to do is stay married, don’t divorce even if time proves you and your spouse incompatible, a guaranteed recipe for a bitter, unhappy end of life. The older you get, the more difficult it is to separate because of your many ties: family, finances, and separation anxiety, in modern psychobabble, “Self-Love Deficit Disorder” or SLDD” (https://psychcentral.com/lib/codependency-no-more-how-to-recover-from-self-love-deficit-disorder#1)
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But if you feel that you truly love a person and want to share a make-believe marriage in Heaven, as ED felt Wadsworth had promised her during his fateful visit to Amherst in 1860, loss of that person, whether by death or by his moving from Philadelphia to San Francisco, makes you miserable, especially if you have a pathological fear of abandonment, as ED did. After Wadsworth moved, ED felt horrible terror, as she told Higginson in JL261, dated April 25, 1862:
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“I had a terror – since September – I could tell to none – and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground – because I am afraid. “
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She felt her life was no longer worth living. She could either commit suicide or sing poems, and she chose the latter. But she worshiped Wadsworth. Eliza Coleman, ED’s second cousin and friend who lived in Philadelphia, attended Wadsworth’s ‘Arch Street Presbyterian’, and took ED to hear his sermon in late March of 1855, knew ED’s strong feelings for him and mailed her copies of his sermons. Presumably, ED tried to imitate his admonishings (enjambed) . . .
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Until she perfected a resemblance to him in her life. Sadly, in her obsessive attempt to live his sermons’ exhortations, ED abdicated her former delight in nature. She had hoped her imitation, her sacrifices for her imagined marriage to Wadsworth, exhibited her love for him. Again, sadly, she knew she was only fooling herself, hence her final “somewhat”.

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.