I Can Wade Grief

Some 50 years before Friedrich Nietzsche, the existential angst-meister, boasted that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger, Dickinson embraces that bravura concept in talking about both private and particular agonies. Only her pain makes her strong. It is tempting to assume that here is the familiar Emily Dickinson, the forever-gloomy, perpetually morose recluse, savaging outright even the idea of joy and preferring rather to submerge herself in pain. Grief, she says serenely, is what I am used to. But to read Poem 252 as simply the sad poem of a bitter old woman testifying that the least brush of joy would be dangerous reduces the poet to a caricature.

At some point—perhaps when she compares happiness to alcohol or perhaps when she teases that happiness is toxic—the possibility enters into an analysis of this poem that there is some delight in the poet’s indulgence of hyperbole, a woman not savoring agony but wondering why other people consider it a burden. She is not defending her life apart but merely reassuring those few friends and family members who were ever invited to read her poetry that joy is not anathema to her, that pain is not her go-to recreational activity but rather that joy is rare, for her and for many others, and that living with a certain level of emotional heaviness is not toxic—it is merely what it means to be human.