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.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed” by Emily Dickinson (1851)
The poem reveals how Dickinson playfully used the metaphor of intoxication to suggest joy, in this case the poet being blown away by the delights of a spring morning. The “inebriate of Dew,” the poet happily describes herself as the “little Tippler / Leaning against the--Sun.”
“Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1838)
With all the ponderous seriousness typical of the Fireside Poets whom Dickinson both admired and disdained, Longfellow offers his inspirational message about the joy and rewards of life despite the difficulties. “Be a hero in the strife,” he advises. Strife cannot last. This contrasts with Dickinson’s far more muted argument that strife is not something you should expect to overcome. Strife is the very element of character.
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman (1865)
Written on the occasion of the national trauma over Lincoln’s assassination, the poem weighs down within the heavy gravity of loss and anger and bitterness. The poem uses the assassination to despair over the world that Dickinson counsels is the world we all must live in; a world of unexpected loss and grief. Do not, Dickinson argues, expect joy; rather anticipate it and in the meantime wade into grief, whole pools of it.
Further Literary Resources
“‘The White Sustenance Despair’: Emily Dickinson and the Convention of Loss” by Allison Giffen (1996)
Loss and grief, the article argues, are central to Dickinson’s vision. The article, however, cautions against applying Dickinson’s biography as a way to approach these poems, among them Poem 252. Rather the poem should be read as an expression of a genre of grief poetry produced by women poets in both American and England who used loss to explore spiritual and emotional hunger within a patriarchal culture.
“The Relation of Love and Death in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson” by Mary Louise Hall (1970)
At the center of Dickinson’s poetry is her sense of the dynamics of dualities, how the universe refuses to coalesce into logic, certainty, and clarity. Poems such as 252 reveal her sense of the tension between despair and hope, confidence and fear.
“‘Esoteric Sips’: Emily Dickinson’s Wine and Alcohol Imagery” by Deborah Ann Yard (1995)
A fascinating read of Dickinson’s frequent use of alcohol and wine, the article makes the point that Dickinson, although herself a committed teetotaler, found in the metaphor of intoxication an irresistible metaphor for those profound moments of delight, whether from nature or from others. The article brings in her culture’s prohibitions against drunkenness and shows how, in using alcohol positively, Dickinson expressed her individuality.
Listen to the Poem
The Swiss media artist and graphic visualist Lucia Hunziker directed a striking black-and-white clip of Poem 252 available on YouTube. The photographic commentary is strangely compelling—bare interior images with spare furnishings and a woman struggling with forbidding loneliness—as is Braunschmidt’s mesmerizing voice reading the poem—particularly striking is her reading of the closing line and her emphasis, almost hissing, the word “Him.” The clip is set to a hauntingly emphatic piano.
Related Titles
By Emily Dickinson
