I Can Wade Grief

Some 50 years before Friedrich Nietzsche, the existential angst-meister, boasted that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger, Dickinson embraces that bravura concept in talking about both private and particular agonies. Only her pain makes her strong. It is tempting to assume that here is the familiar Emily Dickinson, the forever-gloomy, perpetually morose recluse, savaging outright even the idea of joy and preferring rather to submerge herself in pain. Grief, she says serenely, is what I am used to. But to read Poem 252 as simply the sad poem of a bitter old woman testifying that the least brush of joy would be dangerous reduces the poet to a caricature.

At some point—perhaps when she compares happiness to alcohol or perhaps when she teases that happiness is toxic—the possibility enters into an analysis of this poem that there is some delight in the poet’s indulgence of hyperbole, a woman not savoring agony but wondering why other people consider it a burden. She is not defending her life apart but merely reassuring those few friends and family members who were ever invited to read her poetry that joy is not anathema to her, that pain is not her go-to recreational activity but rather that joy is rare, for her and for many others, and that living with a certain level of emotional heaviness is not toxic—it is merely what it means to be human. It may help remember Dickinson was only in her late twenties when she drafted the poem and that perhaps gloomy resignation is for her an amusing distraction. Live, she tells herself, live with circumstances and find your way to make being human a revelation in itself.

The poem suggests a level of levity to Dickinson’s confessional by comparing happiness to alcohol and herself to one so uninitiated to it that, like someone who has never had a drink, she would make a fool of herself. She cautions the cobblestones not to mock her should she ever feel the least “push of Joy” (Line 4) as she would certainly stumble and trip. The image upends the logic of happiness.  Imagine me happy? Okay, imagine me drunk. But being drunk is an escape, a way out and around and over bad circumstances, a way to not be who you are for the briefest period. The poem argues that it is not real; joy is not authentic and those who conceive of joy as somehow the natural state of people are the sad, pathetic ones. It is not that she is happy to be sad, it’s more that she is sad to see so many trying so hard to be happy, those terrified by even the implications of emotional pain. The relentlessly upbeat? There she says are the foolish drunkards.

To make her case, in the second stanza, she suggests that we are all in this together, we are all dealing with sadness we’d rather not acknowledge, darkness we’d rather not deal with. Okay, she says, imagine you are a giant. What makes you mighty, what makes you a giant, is the ability to meet circumstances, to deal with circumstances, to be disciplined and directed and fearless. The depth of your circumstances, the reality of your disappointments, the agonies and ironies of everyone’s life; they alone make you heroic. It’s not that she wants us to be sad and to live terrified of happiness, to settle into a lifetime of sour grapes. It’s that you cannot live afraid of pain, since pain is inevitable. Let your fears, let your sorrows, let them lift you up and they will sustain you. It is not that Dickinson is in love with sorrow—it’s that she does live in fear of it. Nor, she says, should we.

To a can-do culture, America with its brimming confidence, its handy power-cliches, and its certainty that the sun will come up tomorrow, sorrow inevitably is demonized. The hard emotions, the difficult emotions, the poem says, they are real and immediate. The poem addresses the mindset that we need to overcome suffering, we need to live in fear of their intrusion, we should tell ourselves again and again how happy we are to be alive, how great every day is. That sort of intoxication masks the deep-seated certainty that joy is really the exception and that pain is the reality. The poem upends that assumption and considers the possibility that unhappiness is our natural milieu. Engaging that difficult reality elevates our everyday to the heroic. The key is that closing exclamation mark. Dickinson makes noble the trials that life inevitably brings. They alone will lift you up. Give a person a mountain to carry and that mountain will bring out untold, unsuspected strength; a strength that idiotic delight and unironic joy will never give. See those happy idiots? If you worry about anyone, worry about them.