682.1863.So well that I can live without –

So well that I can live without –
I love thee – then How well is that?
As well as Jesus?
Prove it me
That He – loved Men –
As I – love thee –

Who is lowercase “thee” (Lines 2 and 8), and at whom is the imperative “Prove it me” aimed? In her poems, ED honored Jesus, God, and Reverend Charles Wadsworth by capitalizing their referring pronouns (Line 7). Her friend and sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert, was a lifelong committed Christian, and ED was not; hence, I suspect Sue is “thee” and ED’s imperative target for Line 6: “ Prove it me”!

I hear a note of pique in this poem. It sounds like a lover’s confrontation to me, which is likely given Sue’s distancing from ED during the first ten years or so of her marriage to Austin (1856-1895).

There’s something odd about the capitalized “How” in Line 2. ED crunched this six-line poem into the bottom third of a page of small manuscript paper in Fascicle 32. She also apparently intentionally raised the “How well is that ?” part of Line 2 slightly above the first part, as if she intended a new line but saw she would run out of room for the poem’s last line, so converted the two enjambed lines into one line.

In 1929, Martha Dickinson Bianci, ED’s niece, published this poem for the first time in ‘Further Poems’. She recognized the enjambed nature of Line 2 but lower-cased “How” without starting a new line and oddly split the end of Line 2 into two lines:

“So well that I can live without —
I love Thee; then how well
Is that?
As well as Jesus?
Prove it me
That He loved men
As I love Thee.”

I suspect ED envisioned a seven-line septet or a two-quatrain poem:

“So well that I can live without —
I love Thee – then
How well is that?
As well as Jesus?
Prove it me
That He loved men
As I love Thee.”

or,

“So well that I can live without —
I love Thee – then
How well
Is that?

As well as Jesus?
Prove it me
That He loved men
As I love Thee.”

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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.