I Can Wade Grief

Even to readers unfamiliar with the reach of American poetry, Emily Dickinson is a known commodity. She is the Un-poet: unmarried, unloved, unhappy, unsatisfied, unknown, unattractive (she famously compared her face to a kangaroo’s), unread and unpublished. It is tempting to let Poem 252 rest on simplifications that reflect the Un-poet. In this reading, Dickinson, the deeply troubled hermit who wrestled with melancholia, lays out how it feels to accept sorrow as the medium of her life.

Perhaps.

The word “wade” is today associated with hesitant, uncertain movement (as in a kids’ wading pool), derives from an Old English word—wadan—that is actually a military term and means to move directly into what most terrifies, often enemy lines. To wade grief, then, is not a sign of despair or weakness but rather of boldness, the heart a warrior rushing into the fight. Why? It is Dickinson’s insight into the dynamics of emotions that the heart is far more resilient than may be suspected, that the heart is up to the challenge of sorrow, that joy itself is temporary, fleeting, and the hobgoblin of flimsy and tiny hearts. “Power is only Pain / Stranded, thro Discipline/ Till Weights—will hang” (Lines 10-12). Pain is the stuff of everyday, it weighs down every moment until we develop the emotional discipline necessary to meet its challenge.