847.1864. Her final Summer was it—

ED enjambs Line 4-5, and offers an alternate Line 2 and two alternate words for Lines 5 and 7, in {curly brackets}. I prefer all three alternates over her originals and have used them below:

Her final Summer was it—
{Yet we suspected not}
If tenderer industriousness
Pervaded Her, {We thought

A further} {Fund} of life
Developed from within—
When Death lit all the {brevity}
It made the hurry plain—

We wondered at our blindness
When nothing was to see
But Her Carrara Guide post—
At Our Stupidity—

When duller than our dullness
The Busy Darling lay
So busy was she—finishing—
So leisurely—were We—

My interpretation of F847, ‘Her final Summer was it’:

1. During summer, she knew she was dying but didn’t tell us. She seemed more industrious than usual putting her affairs in order. We thought

2. she had found a fund of life deep inside her, so we were surprised when she visibly began to die. That explained why she had been hurrying.

3. We wondered at our blindness, but she showed us nothing that would make us suspect her death was near. Her face was calm as marble. We can’t believe we were so blind to the truth.

4. Even when she began to fade we could not believe the end was near. We took our time when she asked for help and now regret our leisureness. On her deathbed she finished her final legal documents and gave instructions for her funeral.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………..

ED choreographed her own funeral carefully:

“The honorary pallbearers, among them the president and professors of Amherst College, set the casket down after exiting the Homestead’s back door, and their burden was shouldered, at the poet’s own request, by six Irish workmen who had been hired men on the Dickinson grounds.

“Following her late directions, they circled her flower garden, walked through the great barn that stood behind the house, and took a grassy path across house lots and fields of buttercups to West Cemetery [500 yards from Homestead], followed by the friends who had attended the simple service. There Emily Dickinson was interred in a grave Sue had lined with evergreen boughs, within the family plot enclosed by an iron fence.”

( https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/emily-dickinson/biography/special-topics/emily-dickinson-and-death/ )

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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.