852.1864.It was a Grave, yet bore no Stone

It was a Grave, yet bore no Stone
Enclosed ’twas not of Rail
A Consciousness it’s Acre, and
It held a Human Soul –

Entombed by whom, for what offense
If Home or Foreign born –
Had I the curiosity
’Twere not appeased of men

Till Resurrection, I must guess
Denied the small desire
A Rose upon it’s Ridge to sow
Or take away a Briar –
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I think this poem is ED’s religious inquiry into what captor is preventing her from learning whether there is an afterlife. If she can’t know the answer while she’s alive, she can at least believe that Jesus was resurrected. as the Scripture says.
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My interpretation of ‘It was a Grave, yet bore no Stone’:

Stanza 1

IIt was a Grave, yet bore no Stone
Enclosed ’twas not of Rail
A Consciousness it’s Acre, and
It held a Human Soul –

I was in Limbo, without a gravestone. I was trapped, but not by any iron railing. I was conscious, and I had a soul.

Stanza 2

Entombed by whom, for what offense
If Home or Foreign born –
Had I the curiosity
’Twere not appeased of men

Who was holding me captive? For what offense? Was my jailer born here or in a foreign country? I had the curiosity, but my curiosity was not appeased by anyone.

Stanza 3

Till Resurrection, I must guess
Denied the small desire
A Rose upon it’s Ridge to sow
Or take away a Briar –

Until Resurrection, I can only guess who my captor was. Until then, I’m denied even my small desire to sow a rose on Jesus’s brow or take away his crown of thorns.
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There are three variants of F852: Variant A is only the first line because ED sent Variant A to her cousin, who copied the first line into a list of poems, then ED’s manuscript vanished.

The variant used in The Prowling Bee’ is Variant C, “about 1865”. There is one difference between Variants B and C:

Line 8: ’Twere not appeased of “Man” {Men}.

I prefer “Man” over “Men” because ED’s referring to collective “Man”, not plural “Men”.

ED suggested an alternate phrase for Line 12, the last line of Variant C:

“Or take away a Briar” {“palliate a Briar–” }

I prefer her original phrase, “take away”, because she wants to remove the Crown of Thorns that Romans put on Jesus’s head and “sow a rose” instead.
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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.