In this three-stanza poem, Dickinson holds the process of grieving up to inspect its mechanisms and residual effects. As with many of her other poems, such as “It Dropped So Low in my Regard,” Dickinson does not name the source of her sorrow. This lies somewhere outside the frame of her focus, perhaps sparking readers to wonder what would incite the sensations she writes about.
However, the exclusion of the source of her grief is precisely what makes the poem so universally significant. Dickinson describes the process of grieving in a way that is immediate and collectively understood, certainly not bound to her individual life experience.
First Stanza
In the first four-line stanza, Dickinson explores her physical experience of waning grief. Her nerves, previously overwrought, now sit nobly silent. She uses a simile that compares them to tombs. This dark metaphor indicates a depth of gloom still housed inside them. Now, however, they remain cold and stonily silent.
Lines three and four personify the heart. Now rigid, the heart, which Dickinson identifies as male, seems skeptical of the sorrowful intensity it experienced. Numbed and disbelieving, he questions if he experienced this yesterday or if it was actually centuries ago.
Second Stanza
This five-line stanza indicates Dickinson’s movements following her overwhelming grief. Certainly her feet move her from place to place, but the motion is not necessarily by active will, but by passive habit. She responds mechanically, not genuinely conscious--and perhaps not truly caring--whether she walks on the ground, in the air, or by any other medium.
Lines seven and eight are more hermetic in their meaning, perhaps a metaphor available only to the poet herself. She writes of a “Wooden way/Regardless grown”, which may refer to a forest that initially generated from randomly scattered seed. Here, Dickinson may indicate that, while healing, she makes a path through the forest of her existence automatically, without conscious deliberation. All the while, she has a numbed, perhaps coolly impenetrable sense of relief (“a Quartz contentment, like a stone—“).
Third Stanza
This final four-line stanza delineates the process of grief. It compares the period of realization to lead, one of nature’s basest metals and an element that is dark and ultimately poisonous to humans. The second line indicates this sort of grief is something a person always remembers, if they survive the experience—an ominous indication for the profundity of the speaker’s sorrow.
Dickinson closes with two lines that make an oblique reference to death by freezing, which seems a logical culmination of her chilling allusions to nerves like tombs and the slow crystallization of her movements in her reference to “Quartz contentment.” She writes: “As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – / First – Chill –then Stupor –then the letting go –“
Here Dickinson moves from the stony cessation of emotion to a description of the grieving process as a slow death by freezing. It is a multivalent metaphor, pointing to the need to harden oneself against sorrow, to the individual death experienced on relinquishing an idea or person, and to the enormity of the speaker’s misery.
Savannah Schroll Guz - Savannah Schroll Guz holds a Master's Degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1997-1998, she was a Fulbright Scholar and worked as a ...
