Poetry Analysis: “As Imperceptibly as Grief” by Emily Dickinson

I’ve been really captured by this Emily Dickinson poem, and I have been meditating on it for a while now.  Let me share my thoughts.  Like most of Dickinson’s poems, this poem is untitled.  The poems were ultimately numbered when published in the scholarly collection by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955.  Dickinson knew nothing of the numbering.  My Johnson edition reaches a number of 1775 poems, an incredible opus, all but ten unpublished in Dickenson’s lifetime.  If you are not familiar with Dickinson’s biography, you can read the Wikipedia entry.  In summary, she was a reclusive woman, unmarried, living in Amherst, MA, writing poetry all of her life and saving them in boxes with few people even aware of them.   Like all her untitled poems, which I believe were almost all, the opening line usually serve as the poem’s title.  “As Imperceptibly as Grief” is number 1540, written in 1865 when Emily was about 35 years old.  The numbering does not reflect a chronological ordering.  Here is the poem.

 

As Imperceptibly as Grief (1540)

By Emily Dickinson

 

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away —

Too imperceptible at last

To seem like Perfidy —

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun,

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon —

The Dusk drew earlier in —

The Morning foreign shone —

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,

As Guest, that would be gone —

And thus, without a Wing

Or service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful.

 

So what initially captured me was this amazing simile in the poem’s first two lines: “As imperceptibly as Grief/The Summer lapsed away —“  That is a stunning enough simile but there’s more.  The rest of the poem is roughly a description of how summer ends but because Dickinson inverts the normal simile structure—here normal would be “the summer lapsed away as imperceptibly as grief”—the poem becomes just as much about the nature of grief as the end of summer. 

The poem is made up of sixteen lines, four quatrains in common meter.  This is also called a common measure in that the meter alternates between iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet) and iambic trimester (three iambic feet).  Common meter is used in a lot of English hymns such as “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,/That saved a wretch like me!//I once was lost, but now am found,/Was blind, but now I see.” 

Quite a few of Dickenson’s poems are written in this common measure form, and one can’t but help feel the allusion to the themes of hymns.  But there is one important distinction that Dickinson makes in her use of the form from hymns.  While the form calls for a rhyme in the second and fourth lines, Dickinson refuses to give us full rhymes, but ends the lines with slant rhymes, sounds which are of similar sound but not identical.  Here are the rhymed sounds of the four quatrains: away/perfidy, begun/afternoon, shone/gone, keel/beautiful.  Away/perfidy, keel/beautiful don’t even half rhyme but end in the same letter, the first a vowel, the second a consonant. 

One can write a book about Dickinson’s use of slant rhyme, and I would not be surprised if there are several, but to what end are her use of slant rhymes?  First they add tension.  Given the expected rhythm you expect a full sound rhyme, but the unfulfilled sound adds tension which she can either resolve as in a musical piece or leave in tension.  Second I think the slant rhymes provide a contrast to the idealism of hymnal subject matter and make her subjects less idealized and more grounded in a non-perfect reality. 

Her use of capitalization is also odd, and in this poem she capitalizes even more than typical.  There are fifteen capitalized nouns in the poem, one for each line but the third.  This use of capitalized nouns was common in the 17^th and 18^th centuries (see poems by John  Milton, George Herbert, or Alexander pope) and as far as I can tell there were four reasons for capitalizing nouns mid-sentence in those centuries.  (1) It was a cultural absorption from early European printing conventions; German still capitalizes some mid-sentence nouns.  Emily Dickinson is supposed to have known German, but this still doesn’t explain why she uses it.  (2) Nouns of personification were capitalized.  There are four or five nouns of personification in this poem: “Nature,” “Dusk,” “Morning,” “Grace,” and possibly “Guest,” which could ambiguously be a personification or the name as a proper noun.  (3) Nouns were capitalized because it emphasized important concepts, and, more specifically along that line of thinking, (4) nouns were capitalized because they had a religious association. 

By the 19^th century this use of capitalized nouns mid-sentence had pretty much disappeared.  Dickinson is reverting back to something archaic and obsolete.  Why?  You could make the argument that Dickinson has all four points in mind, but I think the allusion to a religious dimension is paramount on her mind.  The capitalization of “Quietness,” “Twilight,” “Dusk,” and “Morning” I think is her attempt to elevate the nouns to a religious phenomenon.  She even calls the “Morning” a “courteous and harrowing Grace.”  So with that, I think the poem should be read within a hermeneutic of nature endowed with the numinous.  Even “Wing” or “Keel” or “Summer” itself, and, therefore, even “Grief” take on a religious connotation.

Her overly use of dashes are also idiosyncratic.  Here I think they are used not for thematic reasons but for mechanical reasons.  Her use of dashes are all at the end of lines—in other poems she uses them internal to lines as well—and function as a means to slow the reader down.  Where she places a dash, she wants to prevent the reader from reading the next line as if it were an enjambment, one line flowing into the next continuously.  Dickinson wants to ensure an end stop, for instance, at “the Summer lapsed away” before moving to “too imperceptible at last.”  The third quatrain has the most dashes, three of the four lines.  Here she is segregating parallel thoughts “The Dusk drew earlier in —The Morning foreign shone —A courteous, yet harrowing Grace…”  It’s not surprising that the first three quatrains all end with a dash, and that the fourth has no dashes because she wants the speed of the lines to accelerate to a climax.

The aesthetics of the poem is shaped around a duple rhythm.  Just as Dante’s aesthetics for his Divine Comedy is shaped around a scheme of three (for the Trinity and other reasons) Dickinson’s aesthetic form here revolves around two, not the twoness of duality (which would imply opposition) but the twoness of doublings which implies a yoking together of concepts.  The rhythm is a perfect unstressed/stressed iambic throughout, and each quatrain divides perfectly into two halves, and each half of a quatrain segments its thought in half.  You can find twos everywhere.  Even the image of a keel in her final quatrain implies a yoking together of two parts, whether she is drawing from the construction of a boat or more likely here the breastbone of a bird, also referred to as a “keel,” which anchors both sets of  a bird’s wing muscles.  This aesthetic of twoness—duple rather than dual—reflects and accentuates the yoking together of grief and of fading summer.

The poem is a dramaturgical unfolding of the dissipation of summer ending and simultaneously the dissipation of grief ending.  Let’s look at summer first.  The opening quatrain is a statement of theme: imperceptibly and with sudden awareness, summer has ended.  It has ended so gradually that one can’t even attribute a sense of betrayal (“Perfidy) or treachery.  Why should there have been betrayal?  Because one doesn’t typically want summer to end.  If spring is the budding of life, summer is the blossom of fulfillment.  As William Carlos Williams said, "In summer, the song sings itself."  As Wallace Stevens said, "The summer night is like a perfection of thought."  Or perhaps most simply as Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys said, "Summer means happy times and good sunshine."  And so, if summer leaves abruptly, it is a treachery; if summer leaves imperceptibly, the deceit is unnoticeable.

The next two stanzas dramatize the process of summer fading away.  Dickinson captures a perfect late summer moment: “a Quietness distilled.”  Can quietness actually be distilled?  It’s either quiet or not, but her use of “distilled” is her means of alluding to the sublime and to the transcendence.  There is a religious allusion to this moment, and perhaps to the process—"Nature spending with herself/[a]Sequestered Afternoon.”  Dickinson in three successive lines slips in the treachery.  The summer twilight moment goes from afternoon to dusk to morning.  Her use of verbs and gerunds emphasize the transience of the moment: “lapsed,” “distill,” “spending,” “drew,” and “gone.”  And so just as one day passes to the next, the summer has passed, as a “guest” that leaves in the morning.  And this passing is a “harrowing Grace,” which could be rephrased as an “acutely painful blessing,” an oxymoron.  What nature lovingly provides is a grace, but, to our heart’s discontent, it is transient, it has passed.

The final quatrain dramatizes the “Summer’s light escape” with a flight imagery, even though summer takes off without a wing or a keel.  (Keel could also be a boating image but keeping with the wing I think it coordinates best with bird flight.)  Dickinson offers a final surprise and projects in the last line the flight into the “Beautiful.”  This is to put the summer experience into its final transcendence, captured as a Keatsian (the poet John Keats) sublimity.  Indeed, Dickinson’s poem seems to owe something to Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”  (“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,/Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/But on the viewless wings of Poesy”)  There too grief and summer and transcendent beauty come together, though grief there is in opposition to beauty,  Dickinson’s summer flight into the “Beautiful” enshrines the summer into memory.  How many songs are there about the memory of a summer love?  Many.

As I said, this poem is just as much about the passing of grief as the passing of summer.  Substitute grief in the poem for summer.  In the first stanza, the passing of grief is a perfidy just like that of summer.  How can the passing of grief be a treachery?  Wouldn’t you want the grieving to go away?  Not necessarily.  Often, maybe most often, people hold on to grief as a companion.  When we grieve, our grief is all we may have left of our loss. And once the loss is no longer felt, we are taken aback, and we might see that as a treachery.  The middle stanzas dramatize the transient nature of the passing of grief.  I don’t know if Dickinson could have been aware of the five stages of grief, but today we do understand that grief goes through temporal stages.  The poem is possibly suggesting the final stage—acceptance.  The acceptance of grief is also a “harrowing Grace,” a painful blessing.

Finally in the last quatrain, grief too takes flight into the beautiful.  It too, Dickinson suggests, moves into the sublime.  But how and why?  It comes down to love.  We only grieve for the loss of someone or something we love.  That love is tied to the grief, and so that love and grief is fixed in the heart and we do not want to lose it.  We ultimately hold it dear because the person we lost is dear.  Think of someone you’ve lost and grieved for.  In time that pain is consoled, and the beauty of that grief remains in some timeless space, forever to be cherished.

Here we are in late September, and the summer has passed, just as imperceptibly as grief.