18 pages • 36 minutes read
Emily DickinsonI Can Wade Grief
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1891A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Unexpected Resilience of the Heart
Even to readers unfamiliar with the reach of American poetry, Emily Dickinson is a known commodity. She is the Un-poet: unmarried, unloved, unhappy, unsatisfied, unknown, unattractive (she famously compared her face to a kangaroo’s), unread and unpublished. It is tempting to let Poem 252 rest on simplifications that reflect the Un-poet. In this reading, Dickinson, the deeply troubled hermit who wrestled with melancholia, lays out how it feels to accept sorrow as the medium of her life.
Perhaps.
The word “wade” is today associated with hesitant, uncertain movement (as in a kids’ wading pool), derives from an Old English word—wadan—that is actually a military term and means to move directly into what most terrifies, often enemy lines. To wade grief, then, is not a sign of despair or weakness but rather of boldness, the heart a warrior rushing into the fight. Why? It is Dickinson’s insight into the dynamics of emotions that the heart is far more resilient than may be suspected, that the heart is up to the challenge of sorrow, that joy itself is temporary, fleeting, and the hobgoblin of flimsy and tiny hearts. “Power is only Pain / Stranded, thro Discipline/ Till Weights—will hang” (Lines 10-12). Pain is the stuff of everyday, it weighs down every moment until we develop the emotional discipline necessary to meet its challenge.
If this is the work of our Un-poet, she is unafraid and undaunted, unimpressed by suffering. If the Fireside Poets, most notably Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a fellow Bay Stater, saw the obligation of the poet to inspire by making joy the medium of experience and pain the occasional interruption as a strategy for manufacturing hope, Dickinson works the opposite strategy: trust your heart, it is stronger than you suspect and treat even the occasion of joy as fun, yes, but weakening like an alcoholic binge.
The Ephemeral Nature of Joy
For Dickinson, the problem is not that suffering defines our everyday world but rather that people assume it should not define that world, presume that joy is our right, our expectation, our normal. Grief is feared because it represents harsh interruption, inexplicable and often illogical. We are haunted by the anything-but-rhetorical question: why do misfortune and grief shatter lives that are otherwise happy? We expect an answer—we have a right to joy. The perception that joy is our right damns our every moment to free-floating anxiety—will this be the moment grief upends everything, if not this moment, then the next?
“The least push of Joy / Breaks up my feet” (Lines 4-5). Dickinson, in her effort to offer consolation and to give witness to a different perception of joy, asks us to see joy as an aberration, a wild and crazy moment apart from the busyness of everyday life, more like the lost weekend of a person unaccustomed to strong drink, the exotic exception that inevitably makes a person look and act foolish. Dickinson does not disdain joy nor deny its validity or its potent impact. Enjoy those moments like a happy drunk temporarily without a care. Joy is real and invigorating—but it does not last. Dickinson does not live expecting joy, cannot live yearning for it, and surely will not live expecting it. Honestly, the poem asks, who can? Joy’s ephemeral nature does not render it ironic but rather all that more special.
The Role of the Poet
It is not enough for Dickinson to embrace the reality of sorrows and suggest the irony of happiness. She is a poet—a poet, in fact, radically out of step with the most recognized and read poets of her era. Although she struggled to find publishers willing to engage her eccentric poetic line, she committed herself across three decades to use poetry as her vehicle for communication with a larger world all too content to ignore her.
Unlike the Fireside Poets who were the literary celebrities of her era, Dickinson perceived the value of poetry to come from honesty. Intoxicated by the ornate language and hyper-optimism in the inspirational verses of poets such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell, readers came to see poets as reassuring teachers, able to sort through the mess of the everyday realities and shape from such confusions comforting wisdom. The Fireside Poets relied on axioms, clever phrasings that used the rhythms and rhymes of conventional poetry to offer (to borrow from the imagery of 252) comforting balm, intoxicating (and addictive) encouragement that freely, happily, and deliberately sang free of the real-time world.
For Dickinson, poetry served a more complex responsibility. Clarity replaces reassurance; honesty upends comfort; and perception displaces fantasy. Those who embraced the happy wisdom and easy power cliches of the Fireside Poets, they were like her poem’s drunks, making quiet fools of themselves, stumbling along in a happy fog. The poem defies the easy chatter of rhythm and rhyme—within the happy feet of such prosody a reader can get pulled into accepting a world-view that says, ironically enough, effort will be rewarded, nobility comes from enduring sorrow until it will be vanquished, and ultimately that God’s in heaven and all is right with the world.
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By Emily Dickinson
