851.1864.“I want” – it pleaded – All it’s life –

851.1864.“I want” – it pleaded – All it’s life –

“I want”—it pleaded—All its life—
I want—was chief it said
When Skill entreated it—the last—
And when so newly dead—

I could not deem it late—to hear
That single—steadfast sigh—
The lips had placed as with a “Please”
Toward Eternity—

In this poem’s manuscript, EED [my new moniker for Emily Elizabeth Dickinson] had no alternative words or phrases.

As noted below, EED intended “I” and “it” to be nominative case, i.e., the subject and its referent pronoun in Line 1, and “Skill” is accusative case, or direct object. “I” is EED’s soul and “it” is the possessive pronoun for “I”. “I” begs the “Skill” (accusative case, direct object) to write great poetry. [Hope I got that right.]

Anthony Madrid on The Prowling Bee [TPB] nailed this poem, F851 so I copied and pasted his interpretation [downloaded 7/13/2026; brackets are mine, LarryB]:

“If I’m right about this one, you have to understand “Skill” (line 3) as accusative case, not nominative. In other words, it’s not skill that’s doing the entreating. It’s the “it” from the first line that’s doing the entreating. “It”—is begging for skill.

“Here, I’ll venture a translation/paraphrase:

[Stanza 1]

“I want, it pleaded all its life. I want was chiefly what it said, when it begged for skill, on its last day, and even when it was newly dead.

[Stanza 2]

“I could not deem that plea too late when I heard that single-minded [final] sigh that the lips had emitted, like the word “Please” aimed at eternity . . . .

If I’m right, the piece shows Emily Elizabeth [EED] respecting and justifying the eternal sense of inadequacy a poet feels. She’s saying a poet’s soul (that’s the “it”) does right to perpetually entreat for skill—to the very end of life and beyond.

“Sentiments like that prompted me [Madrid], years ago, to compare Dickinson to her great Urdu contemporary, Ghalib [1797-1869, Indian poet]. His poetry, too, is full of appreciating and respecting agony, begging, dissatisfaction….

Anthony Madrid”
…………………………………………………………

PS: EED loves to trick readers with riddles, such as Line 3, “When Skill entreated it —”. EED requires her readers to know her tricks well enough that they understand Line 3 is inverted and really means “When it [EED’s soul] entreated Skill”. EDLex Def. 1d of “entreated” is “begged”.
……………………………………………………………….

On another topic, Madrid’s sentence below flipped on a light for me, but not as you might expect:

“If I’m right, the piece shows Emily Elizabeth respecting and justifying the eternal sense of inadequacy a poet feels.”

If Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) gets an initialized moniker, EBB [Google AI overview, 7/13/2026) why should I, LarryB, be calling Emily Elizabeth Dickinson just “ED”? Henceforth “ED” becomes “EED” in my comments.

We don’t call Robert Frost “Robert” or Dylan Thomas “Dylan”, so why call “Emily Elizabeth Dickinson” “Emily”? Finally, EED’s full name takes too long to type, so henceforth she shall be “EED” for me.

PS: One further reason to refer to Emily Elizabeth Dickinson as “EED” is because George Henry Gould, EED’s close friend and confidant she met while they were both young adults in Amherst, gave her and Lavinia the famous “Ebon Box” (F180, 1860) as he left Amherst for a teaching job in New York. On the top of the box he painted their names:

“EMILY E. AND LAVINIA N. DICKINSON”

Presumably, EED’s good friend knew the sisters well enough to know they would appreciate recognition of their middle names with their abbreviations, “E.” and “N.”.

So let’s do it folks, EED deserves our honoring, not our familiarity.

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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.