XXXII

HE put the belt around my life,—
I heard the buckle snap,
And turned away, imperial,
My lifetime folding up
Deliberate, as a duke would do
A kingdom’s title-deed,—
Henceforth a dedicated sort,
A member of the cloud.

Yet not too far to come at call,
And do the little toils
That make the circuit of the rest,
And deal occasional smiles
To lives that stoop to notice mine
And kindly ask it in,—
Whose invitation, knew you not
For whom I must decline?

~Emily Dickinson

In a cursory search for information on this poem, what I’ve discovered is that, though it’s included among Dickinson’s love poems, interpretations seem to identify it as a poem about either the speaker’s devotion to God, or her devotion to her poetic calling. If it’s not a love poem, what is it doing with the other love poems?

This is an interesting example of the significance of context. Because I was thinking of it as a love poem, surrounded as it is in my text by love poems under the heading “LOVE,” I assumed this was a love poem and proceeded accordingly in my reading of it.

It’s a pretty terrible love poem.

The images are of constraint, ignoring, condescension. My 21st-century sensibility protests, “Nobody puts Emily in a corner–or in a belt–whatever!!” It’s not a love poem, I suppose, so much as a poem of devotion. But that devotion is enforced rather than chosen, and no matter how you read it, the “he” doesn’t come out looking so good.

It’s hard to separate my own knowledge and cultural context from this poem. Frankly, “he” sounds like an abuser. The speaker gets snapped into a belt, constrained, controlled. Her lifetime is folded up, she does little toils, she declines invitations because of “him.”

There is a strange sort of elitism in the speaker’s role, however constrained. She is “a member of the cloud.” This sense of a rarefied role–how sincere is it? How tongue-in-cheek? She declines a specific identity in the first stanza, identifying herself as “a dedicated sort.”

This is a strange, strange poem, and the more I read it and delve into it, the stranger it becomes. No matter how I read it, it feels deeply problematic. This one is definitely in the category of “love poems that probably aren’t actually love poems.”