I Can Wade Grief

With her signature playful irony and sassy insouciance, Emily Dickinson, in her Poem 252, “I Can Wade Grief,” dismisses the agony of emotional suffering—agony only makes her stronger, more alive—but joy, even the tiniest hint of joy, is an entirely different thing. Most likely written in 1862 (given how few poems she published during her life, dating Dickinson’s poems is an inexact science), the poem reflects Dickinson’s lifelong fascination with the dynamics of emotional suffering and how a deeply wounded heart gloriously still beats, flipping the conventional argument and concluding here that it is the expectation of happiness, not its anticipation, that makes a heart weak.

Because Dickinson’s biography looms so large above her work and because she has come to be typecast as America’s Grand Recluse, perpetually depressed and terminally melancholic, Poem 252 has often been read as an anatomy of emotional devastation and Dickinson’s rejection of joy and her embrace of the pain of loneliness. However, the text itself opens up to a much wider and more luminous interpretive horizon: Dickinson mocks the dimensions of her own pain and asserts that enduring grief is something akin to her superpower.

Poet’s Biography

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born December 10, 1830 in the quiet college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where her father was a successful lawyer and a trustee at Amherst College. Dickinson proved early on to be a voracious and unconventional reader, intrigued by Christian theological writings, cutting-edge theoretical work in science, the metaphysical poetry of the English Renaissance, and the provocative essays of the New England Transcendentalists. In 1847, Dickinson briefly attended nearby Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, now Mount Holyoke College, before returning home to Amherst. Unmarried, Dickinson, who was shy by disposition, adopted a quiet lifestyle, seldom venturing from her family’s home yet maintaining correspondence with close friends and with her younger siblings while maintaining her father’s hectic social schedule.

By 1850, Dickinson was composing original verse. Fascinated by the process through which the intellect shaped emotional experiences using the vehicle of metaphors, Dickinson crafted poetic lines different from the poetry of her era. She distilled poetic lines to minimalistic expressions, altered the grammatical use of words, created her own individual style of punctuation and capitalization, and upcycled the gentle rhythms of the Protestant hymns she loved. Her poems were so individual in their thematic investigations—namely the dynamics of love, death, and the struggle for purpose—and so radical in their formal structuring, that they seldom found a sympathetic publisher. For decades, Dickinson shared her poems with friends but otherwise carefully organizing her poems, which were never titled and seldom dated, into bundles bound with ribbon in boxes beneath her bed. Her poems totaled more than 1700 at her death. What few poems she published suffered at the hands of intrusive editors trying to make her eccentric poems conventional, less startling.

After Dickinson’s death in May 1886 at the age of 55, her family discovered the archive of her poetry and began to publish her verse. A complete volume of her poems, however, would not appear until nearly 75 years after her death.

Poem Text

I can wade Grief—   

Whole Pools of it—  

I'm used to that—  

But the least push of Joy

Breaks up my feet—  

And I tip—drunken—  

Let no Pebble—smile—  

'Twas the New Liquor—  

That was all!

Power is only Pain— 

Stranded, thro' Discipline, 

Till Weights—will hang—   

Give Balm—to Giants—     

And they'll wilt, like Men—  

Give Himmaleh—  

They'll Carry— Him!

Dickinson, Emily. “I Can Wade Grief.” 1862. Genius.

Summary

The poem is given no context, no backstory to account for the opening declaration. That declaration, as unsettling as it is shocking, appears to be offered only to the speaker herself. The statement is bold largely because it runs so counter to common sense. “I can wade Grief / Whole pools of it / I’m used to that” (Lines 1-3). Thus, we are aware of two extraordinary facts about the speaker: 1) she has lived with pain, we assume because of the word “grief” that it has been emotional pain rather than physical pain; 2) and that the emotional pain has not devastated her, that in fact she has learned to handle that pain and mastered it, because she lives with it. The nature of the pain is a matter of conjecture, perhaps a lost love, a death, financial strains, a spiritual crisis with her God, or maybe a free-floating sorrow. Because the poem refuses specificity, it invites identification with the speaker.

Turning logic on its head, the speaker goes on to assure us that grief she can handle, but she is uncertain how she might handle “the least push” of “Joy” (Line 4). Indeed, she says only half-jokingly that joy would so disorient her, used to sadness as she is, that she would reel and stumble like a careless drunk. Amused by the idea, she cautions the pebbles on the street where she would theoretically stumble, drunk with unexpected happiness, not to mock her clumsiness. “ ‘Twas the New Liquor” (Line 8), that is, it was only this thing called joy that she was not expecting. She is like someone who has never sampled strong alcohol before, a harmless and decidedly amateur drinker of joy.

The speaker then turns more philosophical, sensing the implications of what she has revealed, how accustomed she is to her own emotional agonies. Power, she counsels, makes a person stronger. In fact, power is what is created when a stout and strong soul undergoes not the ordeal of raw and urgent pain--whether illness, or the death of someone close, or a heart shattered into fragments—but rather the day-to-day disappointments and frustrations. Pain that lingers (or is “stranded” to use the poet’s phrasing) that builds character, the discipline to live, day to day, with the sorrow, itself undefinable and untreatable. She carries its weight, every moment, every day.

Indeed, aware of the inverted logic of her argument, she playfully teases out the implications of her philosophy, give giants “Balm” (Line 13), that is, medicine designed to numb pain, and such comfort will “wilt” them until they are just ordinary namby-pamby men (Line 14). But, she says, delighting in the exaggerated hyperbole of her own argument and getting caught up in its logic, have those same giants carry the Himalayan mountains (she uses the old cartographers Sanskrit word for the mountain range, Himmaleh) and those huge and forbidding mountains will feel so light that it would seem the mountains are carrying the giants. Pain, constantly there, will lift you. We thrill to the speaker’s joie de vivre, her unapologetic tenacity, her unsuspected strength. Adversity? Bring it on, she says with a quiet smile. Pain, she teases, only makes you aware and alive. Reversing accepted wisdom, she says to pity those who expect their lives to be happy and contented. They are the wilted, the weak, the undisciplined, the unaware, the pathetic.