854.1864.Despair’s advantage is achieved

854.1864.Despair’s advantage is achieved

Despair’s advantage is achieved
By suffering – Despair –
To be assisted of Reverse
One must Reverse have bore –

Now, that’s a happy stanza! “bore” sounds like a hole I drilled this morning. Methinks ED meant “borne”.

The Worthiness of Suffering like
The Worthiness of Death
Is ascertained by tasting –
As can no other Mouth

Gosh, another stanza even happier than the first. Sounds like ED’s life was a bowl of cherries.

Of Savors – make me conscious –
As did ourselves partake –
Affliction feels impalpable
Until Ourselves are struck –

In fact, this poem feels like ED was struck by a bolt of pure giddiness.

Oh! Woe is me, and who is the unnamed god[?] she’s begging to “make me conscious” of “Savors”? Geeez.

OK, I’ll try to play along with a biographical interpretation:

Stanza 1.

Despair’s advantage is achieved
By suffering – Despair –
To be assisted of Reverse
One must Reverse have bore –

S1.

To know pain I have to feel pain, to know despair I have to feel despair. I desperately loved Wadsworth through four years of correspondence, but when I finally met him, he took advantage of my naivete and left me crying. That was a rude “Reverse”, but now I know how it feels to live through a “Reverse” that hurt so bad I wanted to die, many times.

Stanza 2.

The Worthiness of Suffering like
The Worthiness of Death
Is ascertained by tasting –
As can no other Mouth

I’ve tasted suffering, I’ve tasted death, and only if I’ve tasted these can I empathize with a fellow sufferer.

Stanza 3.

Of Savors – make me conscious –
As did ourselves partake –
Affliction feels impalpable
Until Ourselves are struck –

S3.

Dear God,

Like Jesus, please let me “savor” the pain of nails pounded through my hands and then hang me by them on a cross. Only when I’ve felt his pain can I know what he felt, share his pain.

Ok, now can we move on to the next poem?

HOME

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.