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.
Literary Devices
Form
The poem divides into two nine-line stanzas. The first is narrative-like in that it relates a story, albeit symbolic, of the impact joy can have on a person who understands that life is not designed for joy as a constant state of existence. The stanza delivers the story of a person unaccustomed to alcohol tapping into the delightful inebriation (the least push of Joy) and returning, a bit addled but hardly an alcoholic, ready to embrace the reassuring stability of the difficult day to day.
The second stanza would be familiar to mid-19th century readers. The stanza deals more deliberately with the poem’s lesson as if Dickinson wants to show she can deliver a lesson on par with the stodgy Fireside Poets. In this stanza, however, the lesson delivered is unconventional, even upsetting on first read. Suffering is invigorating, the greater the sorrows, the more resilient the heart can be.
Be a giant. That use of a closing stanza was typical of the public poetry of the Fireside Poets—the closing stanza delivers in pithy lines rendered in tight rhythm and often clever rhymes the lesson the poet wants to convey in lines sculpted to encourage easily memorization. Dickinson resists such comforting form: her lines are lacerated by dashes, she resists any regular meter, she denies the comforting word play of rhymes. Buck up, her form says; life isn’t easy rhythm and clever rhymes.
Meter
To mimic the liberating feel of inebriation, the meter is subtly uneven, irregular, with just enough rhythm to suggest a drunk trying nevertheless to walk aright. In moving between metrical patterns as well as in the poem’s generous use of dashes, the poem is both conservative and radical, suggesting the poem’s theme of the dynamic between grief and joy.
Metrically, the poem is set in Dickinson’s go-to rhythm: the iamb, the two-beat unit that best reads as conversational rather than poetic and upcycles the metric setting of Old Testament psalms as well the common time meter of conventional Protestant hymns. The two-beat unit stresses the second beat, duh-DUH. In recitation, the iamb is accessible and ear-friendly.
Most of the lines are in iambic tertrameter, with eight beats, or four iambs. But those lines are interrupted by lines of iambic trimeter, six beats, or three iambs. As Dickinson would no doubt have known, this alternating metric scheme is best known through the iconic hymn “Amazing Grace.” To use that metrical pattern to celebrate the agonies of life given that hymns Christian expectation of grace and joy creates in the poem’s meter a sense of Dickinson’s playfulness, her giddy delight in what the staid and conservative world of her Protestant New England would undoubtedly condemn. The meter mirrors the same shifting back and forth as the poem’s central argument, which concludes that sadness and sorrows are the given in this world, so enjoy those wonderful moments of joy but understand their tonic impact comes only because it does not, cannot, and will not last.
Voice
No speaker is identified. No particular sorrow is defined. The voice comes across more as that voice in your head that reassures you at the most emotionally difficult moments that you got this. Remember, she tells herself, giants are only giants because of their formidable strength.
This is not a poem about Big Pain—handling a breakup or adjusting to the death of someone close or facing the reality of betrayal. It is all of those, plus the casual little agonies that define the everyday; a sunset missed, a fine meal over, a conversation ended. Because the voice does not make specific their sorrows, the voice is lifted into the widest register. The voice speaks for us, engaged in a life where sorrows, big and small, are the given, where joy the moment’s respite.
In this, the voice mimics the public poetry of the Fireside Poets whose impersonal voice creates the august stature of the Poet, capital P. Power comes from pain that sticks around—the voice is that familiar motivational speaker adept at axioms intended to inspire. The voice moves to that closing joyous affirmation—suggested by the exclamation point—that ironically inverts traditional inspiration wisdom.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
