A Dickinson Poem

I recently came upon this Emily Dickinson poem—one I hadn’t read before, yet find incredibly rich in resonance, crafted with immense subtlety. Understood most fully within its New England cultural context, it brilliantly nuances contemporary reflection as well in its strident humanism.

She remains my favorite poet:

That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we dont believe
Does not exhilirate.

That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate –
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.

Briefly, the poem opens with the speaker’s affirmation that life is to be cherished precisely because of its transience. She refuses to feign belief in something she cannot embrace: the recompense of an afterlife.

The second stanza explains why, drawing on “ablative”—the Latin grammatical case denoting removal or “taking away.” To Dickinson, a conventional heaven is an “ablative estate” because it strips away our physical, sensory selves. (Intriguingly, “ablation” also carries a modern surgical definition of tissue removal, reinforcing this sense of loss).

Ultimately, the proffer of this sterile, diminished eternity only instigates an appetite “precisely opposite”: a heightened hunger for the sensory, mortal now.

–RJ