881.1864.I meant to find Her when I Came –

I meant to find Her when I came –
Death – had the same design –
But the Success – was His – it seems –
And the Surrender – Mine –

I meant to tell Her how I longed
For just this single time –
But Death had told Her so the first –
And she had past, with Him –

To wander – now – is my Repose –
To rest – To rest would be
A privilege of Hurricane
To Memory – and Me –
……………………………………………………………….

My interpretation of F881, ‘I meant to find Her when I Came – ‘, with ED’s extensive mid-1870s revisions in {curly brackets}:

Stanza 1.

I meant to find Her when I Came –
Death – had the same design –
But the Success – was His – it seems –
And the Surrender {Discomfit}- Mine –

S1.

I meant to find Her when I came, but Death had the same design. The success was his, it seems, and the surrender mine.

Stanza 2.

I meant to tell Her how I longed
For just this single time –

(a) For just {this single} time –
(b) For just {this only} time –
(c) For {this specific} time –
(d) For {this peculiar} time –

But Death had {told} Her {enamored} so the first –
And she had past {hearkened ; trusted ; fled}, with Him –

S2.

I meant to tell Her how I longed to see her for just this single time, but Death had told her first, and she had fled with Him.

Stanza3.

To wander – now – is my Repose {Abode} –
To rest {pause}- To rest {dwell; stay} would be
A privilege of Hurricane {misery}
To Memory – and Me –

S3.

To wander now is my abode – to pause would be a privilege of misery, to memory and me.
………………………………………………………………

I wonder whether the speaker, ED, realized just how hurtful she would be to tell a dying person “I longed to see her for just this single time” and then to focus on her own “misery” for having missed her opportunity to say goodbye.

As someone once said, we must take ED for better or for worse.
……………………………………………………………………………

PS. The online photocopy of ED’s manuscript of this poem is faint, and she scribbled edits on it much more than she usually did. One source says the name “Eliz“ is on the manuscript, but, if it is, I can’t see it.

PPS. ED’s mother, Elizabeth Norcross Dickinson, died on November 14, 1882, so “Eliz.” probably doesn‘t refer to her.
………………………………………………………………………………………..

10/26/2026

I just read Cynthia Wolff’s paragraph (below). The poem’s death probably 20 years earlier when ED was 13 years old and her friend, Sophia Holland, died at age 15. The trauma sent ED into a month or more of deep depression that only waned when ED was sent to Boston to visit her aunt and sightsee.

So, Emily, please accept my sad apology. In future, I’ll try to learn more about the situation before passing judgement when empathy is needed.

”

Sophia Holland had died on April 29, 1844, when Emily Dickinson was thirteen years old. To a twentieth-century reader, unaccustomed to the presence of death in the home, Dickinson’s persistence and curiosity may seem morbid, but the vigil over Sophia Holland constituted a part of Emily Dickinson’s training for womanhood in mid-nineteenth-century Amherst; and if the confrontation with death inspired horror, as it seems to have done in this case, there was no adequate remedy. Dickinson’s parents sent her away to Boston so that she might put the episode out of mind; however, death knew no boundaries of city or town, and she understood as much. Thus the event lingered in her imagination, crying out for redress or at least explanation.”

Emily Dickinson, by Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Part One, III, «School: Faith and the Argument from Design», pp. 76-77; Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988.

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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.